


tale as old as time

by spacelabrathor



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Comics), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Beauty and the Beast Fusion, Desriptions of killing and butchering animals for food, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Knotting, Mild Angst, Thor remains a beast - there is no magical transformation at the end, Very mild dubious consent
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:01:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 40,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23861992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacelabrathor/pseuds/spacelabrathor
Summary: Thor is a beast, prowling the halls of an empty castle alone, living a life of cold, barren solitude. Villagers visit once yearly to bring him gifts he does not seek, piling valueless trinkets at his gate they feel will keep him appeased. They hate Thor and Thor knows, someday, that they will breach his gates and come for his head. He wonders to himself, often, if he will try to stop them when they do.This year, though, the offering has changed. Thor finds not trinkets at his front gate, but a girl, and then everything begins to change.A Beauty and the Beast AU.
Relationships: Thor (Marvel)/Original Female Character(s), Thor (Marvel)/Reader, Thor/You
Comments: 170
Kudos: 355





	1. Chapter 1

The castle is a cold, sprawling thing. Up on a hill with a bare courtyard of marble and withered garden out front and wrought iron all around, drawing an unforgiving boundary between the grounds of the keep and the dense forest of conifer that surrounds it on all sides. Tall walls of white limestone worn to gray by the elements and time reach into the bleary sky, entombing towers and halls and great empty rooms in the heavy silence of a mausoleum. **  
**

Paintings line the halls, covered in a heavy drape of dust and spider’s web, and what tapestries remain sag from disrepair. Their vibrance and artistry lost along with the memories of any merry festivities that ever graced the empty halls. Grand balls and banquets and laughter and wine, just an echo of a ghost now, as the wind howls against the shuttered windows and sneaks its way through. Swirling cold clouds of dust across the stone-paved floors.

The footprints there are the only sign of any life within the castle walls. Barefoot and large and tracking down only the very main halls, the light, occasional drag of a cloak trailing behind them drawing lines in the dusty floor on either side. 

One would assume the castle to be abandoned, if not haunted, in it it’s towering emptiness. It’s gates unopened for years, no smoke rising from it’s great many chimneys, the slinking shadow of something monstrous slipping through the forest at night the only indication that any life may remain there. 

There is a village three days ride from the castle, south and east. Down in the valley with roads of sloppy mud and homes of thatched roof and sagging, timber walls, The villagers there know of the thing that roams the barren halls of the keep. The creature that lurks in the forest and mauls their livestock if they do not pay sufficient tribute in the form of golden trinkets and goods, presented just outside the iron gates every spring. 

They call him the beast and they hate him. They fear him and they hate him and they curse him when the seasons turn cold and blustery and when their crops fail them. They bring him his offering every year and spit on the great gates surrounding the keep, checking over their shoulders to be sure he isn’t near to rip their flesh with his teeth. 

With every passing year, the castle grows darker. More silent, as the forest slowly encroaches. Growing closer and closer to the gates surrounding it. In a hundred years, perhaps, it will overtake the great keep. Fill it with life and bird song and reclaim the space to nature and life. 

For now, it sits. High on the hill and looming. A shadow of memory of what once was and what will never be again. It’s echoing halls haunted by the apparition of a creature, more animal than man, that disappears into back into its emptiness like he was never there at all.

The sound of horse hooves over sloppy ground travels easily on the crisp air, and the beast lifts his head. Stilling in one of the empty castle halls to listen, bathed in thin gray light bleeding through a boarded window. Quiet, he breathes, and then hears it once more - the nicker of horses, approaching, and he knows that the villagers have come. 

He growls lowly, something hardening in his chest, and he turns in place and stalks through the arched doorway and down a narrow hall. Turning right and then left, and crossing over a dark passageway to find the narrow, spiraling staircase of the northern tower, and going up. 

He reaches the top after a minute of climbing, stepping onto the small, covered balcony atop the tower, and searches. His eyes sharp and scanning the perimeter of the grounds, knowing, somewhere...

He spots them and another growl rumbles in his chest. Deep and reflexive at the sight of four horses, looking small from his great height, standing at the front gates. Three of them with a rider each, the fourth saddled but unmounted. He watches and waits, as the group speaks amongst themselves for a moment, and then finally, turns to leave. The horses jerked back towards the thick line of the forest by riders with hands rough on the reins as the horses snort and stomp in the slushed snow in protest. 

The rider leading pauses, just before crossing the threshold into the dark cover of the forest, and turns back over his shoulder. 

“ **Beeeaaast!** ” he shouts. Booming and loud, startling the horse beneath him and the others, his voice sharp on a mock that carries on the wind. 

The beast bares his teeth, high in his tower, on the sound of faint laughter as the rider’s disappear into the thick of the trees. The wind howls, bitter and whipping against the heavy pelt tied around the beasts throat and draped over his back, and he lets out a rumbling exhale. Clenching his jaw as he waits for the sound of the horses to fade on the chilled air, until at last, silence descends once more. 

He waits another moment, the angry rumble in his chest continuing on, until at last he breathes out between his teeth. Satisfied they’ve gone, hearing the wind whistle through the pines without the faint thud of the rider’s heartbeats beating beneath it.

He turns back, and makes his way back down, his bare feet silent on the snow covered stone stairs. 

The villagers travel to the castle every spring, and the beast dreads it with every day that grows longer with the coming change of the season. They bring him things, cheap artifacts made of pimpled tin and gilded in cheap gold tar that flecks off into the snow where they leave their pile of offering. The items are valueless, almost comically so, and the beast wonders if the practice, once borne of tradition and an attempt at self-preservation, has turned into a mockery. 

It’s unnecessary, of course. The beast does not venture near the village by design, prowling the forest in the north and west to hunt his prey. He avoids them and they him, save for this annual journey to offer him what they think he so desires. Their disdain grows for him with each year, obvious and apparent, blaming him for any misfortune that befalls their home and unable to keep the sneer from their voices when they announce their presence as they depart his front gates. 

His name was Thor, once, though the villagers have given no indication that they know of his past. That he was ever anything other than the creature they so abhor. 

Deep somewhere in his chest, he knows that someday, they will come for him. That someday, they will attempt to breach the wrought iron gates of his keep and that they will try for his head. 

He wonders to himself, often, if he will try to stop them when they do. 

Thor makes his way through the castle, the pelt around his throat billowing softly behind him as he walks through darkened halls and makes his way towards the front entrance, leaving large footprints on the dusty stone in his wake. He crosses the foyer, high ceilinged and bright with refracted light, to the servant door that’s tucked behind a pillar on the far wall. Ducking to squeeze through it and closing it behind him, finding it to be much less effort than opening the grand marble doors that make the castle’s proper entrance. 

It has begun to snow, fat, heavy flakes drifting lazily down from the gray sky, and Thor shakes his head as a few land on his cheeks as he steps out into the courtyard. He walks down the stone path at the center of it, surrounded on either side by patches of dead earth where flowers once grew. The wind swirls past him, gusting and frigid and carrying on it thick sheets of snow, and Thor gives up any hope of eating tonight. Anything alive in the forest will be bedded down, and in another few minutes he likely won’t be able to see his hand in front of his face at the rate the snow is falling. 

He means to retrieve whatever they’ve left him. Not because he has any desire for it but to deter any roaming travelers from coming across what looks to uneducated eyes to be a pile of treasure stacked just outside his gate. To avoid them wondering if there is more for the taking inside his keep. 

The front gate opens from the inside and Thor releases the latch with one hand, leaning his shoulder into the seam of it to budge the heavy gate outwards and open. 

Thor shakes his head again, snow falling down to his shoulders and down the pelt on his back, and stops. 

There is nothing there. 

Thor frowns, his lip turning down on the two thick tusks that root to his lower jaw. 

They always leave a pile of items just to the east of the gate. Goblets and small chests and other metal works he has no use for. There are the marks of human footprints and horse hooves in snow, clustered and busy, like they moved around a bit here at the gate, but as Thor squints against the howling wind, he sees no offering laid out, even when he leans down and moves the drifts of gathering snow with his palms. 

He stands tall, then. Going very still against the howling wind as his heart kicks into a sudden gallop in his chest. His senses lurching to life, honing and sharpening like a blade at the rough drop in his gut that tells him something is amiss. He turns and scans the edge of the forest, where the trees grow thick and close together and the ground is covered in shadow and snow, but sees nothing. 

He turns back to the tracks in the snow, lifting his nose on the buffeting winds for scent but finding it long gone. The prints are largely muddled in the slushy snow underfoot, a mess of the mud underneath and the heavy sheets of snow falling now in earnest, but his eyes go to a single pair of footprints. Human, and separate from the others. The other prints lead from the forest, gather in a cluster near the gate, and then lead back to the forest. 

This pair, Thor realizes, his gut turning to lead, leaves the group. Small, human footprints that travel east, along the iron wall, and around the corner. He follows them, nearly dropping to all fours as he does. Tracing them around the line of the fence, huffing in deep pulls of chilled air to try to catch the scent of them, his heart kicking hard in his chest. Confusion and anger and dread swirling battling in his mind, slurring together and narrowing his vision as he follows the tracks through the driving snow. 

The tracks gather along the fence where the bars have grown rusted and worn with decay, as if the layer had stopped for a moment and taken a step back. The tracks pick up on the other side of the fence, and with a sinking rush, Thor realizes that someone has slipped through the bars and made it inside the grounds of his keep. 

He whirls on his feet, a growl ripping from his chest, and charges back the way he came and rounding the corner. Slushed snow spraying under his feet as he slips through the open gate and reaches up to slam it closed, hammering his fist on the lock to secure it before gripping at the pelt at his back to keep it close and surging back towards the castle. Nearly blind with sickening rash of rage and survival instinct, dumping loads of adrenaline into his blood and driving him forward, faster - knowing that someone awaits in his castle. Knowing that they have finally breached his walls and have come for him. 

He finds the servant door open when he’d left it closed and he barges in. Lowering his shoulder and shoving through the small archway, bashing his shoulders on either side of it in his haste. 

His eyes adjust inside, sharpening in the dimmer light, and he hears it before he sees it. Smells it too. The frantic pulse of a racing heartbeat and the souring stink of fear, acrid on the chilled air. He whirls in place, looking, his teeth bared, and then he hears a soft intake of breath, and he charges forward. Blind, and bursting at the seams with instinctive, defensive rage. 

There’s someone there. Standing on the far side of the foyer. 

He makes it a few paces from them and lurches to a halt, waiting for the tear of an arrow against his flesh or the slice of a blade across his chest as he stands to full height and roars. Throwing his arms back and unhinging his jaw with the fierce of it. Teeth bared as the thunder of it crashes off every marbled surface in the room and echoes, deafening, down each darkened hall beyond. 

The figure shrinks, stepping back once, and then twice, and then falling back to their hip on the stone-paved floor. Thor hears another hard intake of breath, a ragged, terrified gasp over the roar of their heartbeat and his, and he shakes his head. Roughly, trying to - to clear his vision, to see - 

It’s a girl. Fallen to the ground and staring up at him with eyes white with utter panic. Dressed in simple clothes, a tunic and a dark cloak, with grubby breeches. Barefoot, leaving wet puddles under her feet. 

Thor chokes back another roar, instinctive and nearly ripping from his chest in spite of him, and forces a halting step backwards. Shaking his head once more, a rumbling growl coming from somewhere deep in him as he tries to make sense - tries to understand what he’s seeing. 

He lifts his nose sharply, scenting the air as his chest heaves on ragged breaths. Searching for the bitter burn of fire or smoke on her, or the sharp sting of the scent of a blade hidden under her cloak, but finding none. Waiting for her to strike at him with whatever she has, now that she’s drawn him out. 

All he smells from her is terror, bone-deep and chilling, as she looks up at him from the floor, paler than porcelain from fear and the cold. 

Thor’s mind whirls. Tripping and catching on itself as he tries to understand - why they left her here - why she slipped between the bars of his gate. Why she isn’t screaming or fleeing or attacking or - 

Her breath is fogging up the air in front of her face on ragged puffs, and he realizes how he must look. Towering over her, bare chested in the gray light. Teeth bared and horns spiraling slowly from his skull. A monster, in name and form. 

He forces himself back another step and feels, for the first time since he can remember, the urge to speak rise up on his tongue. 

She watches him retreat, her chest heaving, and pushes herself upright until she’s sitting up, rolled onto her hip on the stone floor. Fear still permeating from her every pore, but something creeps in the edges of her expression as she looks up at him. Something like confusion, and Thor thinks that’s a little rich, considering. 

He opens his mouth to speak but a rumble comes out instead. A low growl that he tries to bite back as he clenches and unclenches his jaw. Trying to remember how to form words when he hasn’t in a decade or more. 

He gestures towards the servant door, left cracked open, swirling snow visible in the narrow space. Another growl comes when he opens his mouth again, and he shakes his head, hard. His rage dissolving into a meld of confusion and frustration as he looks down at her on his floor. 

“Go,” he manages finally. An approximation of speech, rough and raw sounding. Deeper than he remembers. 

Her eyes go to the door, then back to him. She’s shaking, a fine tremble to the narrow set of her shoulders, though from the cold or fear he does not know. 

“I cannot go back,” she says. Her voice wavers, but is stronger than he expects. 

A smell tinges the air then. Faint, just a whisper, but it flirts delicately with Thor’s senses. Something fresh, like crisp, spring air, and Thor realizes that underneath the fog of terror scent coming off of her in waves, that it must be the smell of her. 

He scrubs at his face with his palm, shaking his head again to clear it. “You,” he says, haltingly. Struggling. “You cannot stay.” Every word is pressed through bared teeth, rigid and severe, more than he means it to. He cannot stop the constant gravel of a growl that’s rolling from his chest. Instinctive and unconscious at the sight of stranger in his castle. 

She stays where she’s seated, and he can hear her heart over the thud of his own. He realizes, staring at her hard, that it’s beginning to slow. Beginning to calm, against all sense and reason. He catches another drift of that fresh scent on the air, warmer this time, and it startles him. Draws a reflexive, loud growl from his lungs. Snapping his teeth when he realizes that her fear is fading - 

“ ** _GO_!**” he roars, nearly dropping to all fours and then charging past her in the foyer. Into the darkness of the hall beyond, scrubbing his hands over his face to clear the scent of her from his senses. He stays there, in the dark, hunched over. Breathing heavily in the shadow, his ears trained helplessly on the quiet pause. And then the whisper soft sound of her bare feet on the floor. Another pause then, and he realizes he is holding his breath, his heartbeat raging in his ears. 

He hears a soft click then, and when he turns and looks into the dimly lit foyer, she is gone. 

He lets out a rush of breath, too loud in the hushed quiet, and lets his head hang between his shoulders. Feeling a little light in the head as he returns to himself, slowly. Swaying in the empty space of his foyer, knowing now what it feels like to have another person close. 

Alone he stands, his jaw clenched as a familiar, cold loneliness comes creeping back in. He closes his eyes and leans towards the feeling, welcoming it as an old friend, and tries to scrub the scent of her from his memory. 

The snow continues to fall in heavy sheets, the wind bracketing against the shuttered windows of the keep, and Thor paces. 

He seeks out her scent when she’s first left, dropping to all fours to scent at the stone floor where she’d sat and feeling something warm and shuddering behind his ribs as her scent floods his tongue and throat. Alive and warm and inextricably female. 

He pushes himself to his feet, groaning softly, and goes to the servant door. Finding it shut securely behind her. He pulls it open, his nose lifting on the air in spite of himself, but finding no trace of her there as he looks out into the swirling, gray cold beyond. 

She is gone. So, he paces. 

Unsettled profoundly and rudderless, he pads through the empty castle halls. His breath fogging up the air as he traces familiar paths, moving without thought. His nerves raw and aching as he passes the dark kitchen, pauses, and then moves on, knowing his belly will not hold food with the discomfort thickening up in his bloodstream. 

He can’t rid himself of the scent of her. It follows him through the vacant corridors, palms at his nose and mouth, trying to clear it. The fear scent faded quickly, lost in the thin air in the foyer upon her departure, but the root of it remains. Fresh and _living_ and making his mouth flush with saliva even as he groans and shakes his head once more. 

Night is falling. He can tell by the lengthening shadows cast through the boarded windows and he cannot take his mind from her as he paces. He cannot clear in his mind why she was there, if not to harm him. Why her fellow villagers left her at his gates and why she told him she could not return. 

She feared him, but did not scream. She looked upon him with widened eyes, but he’d heard with his own ears as her heartbeat had begun to quiet, even as he bared his teeth at her and roared. 

Her voice echoes in his mind like a bell struck, and he growls to himself. Miserable and nauseous, his belly sour and empty in his gut. 

He finds himself in the foyer again. Drawn helplessly to the faintest remains of her scent still lingering there as he stands in the quiet and the approaching dark and listens to the howling of the wind. A hard gust grips the edges of the servant door and rattles it in it’s latch, and he watches as a small puff of snow drifts across the stone floor from the crack beneath it. 

A sickening realization curls around his heart, when he finally allows himself to think it. When he stops fiercely pushing the thought from his mind, needing to avoid the inevitable conclusion. 

He could make it to the village in a night, if he needed to. If he went at a hard sprint and the weather was favorable. It takes days on horseback, and the storm outside shows no signs of abating as night falls. 

She has no horse, and she is no beast. 

He very nearly goes to his knees as he realizes that he has sent her to die by banishing her out to the storm. 

He squats down onto his haunches, feeling his stomach twist harshly. Clenching his jaw and watching snow slowly work it’s way beneath the worn wood of the servant door in soft little gusts. Drifting across the stone floor and towards him as his mind turns heavily on a choice. 

It’s not cold. Not to him, even bare chested and barefoot, with only the tattered remnants of a pair of breeches and the pelt around his throat covering him. But she is not him. She had a thin cloak, threadbare and useless against the driving wind. 

An image flashes through his mind, unbidden, of her being discovered in the spring by traveling hunters in the wood. Curled up at the base of a great oak, pale and lifeless and covered in melting snow, and he growls then. Snapping his teeth in the cold air and shoving himself to his feet, a fire lighting in his chest as he strides towards the servant door. 

He doesn’t hesitate, ripping the door open until the hinges groan, and ducking his head against the whip of snow as he steps out into the cold, dark abyss. 

He goes to track her but knows in an instant that he can’t, his own footprints covering in snow moments after he leaves them as he steps away from the wall of the castle. It’s dark now, the last light of day a dim, faint gray that's losing quick ground the coming of night. 

Without footprints to track, it’s just as well. Thor’s nose works sharper without his eyes distracting him.

He goes to the fence, remembering where she had slipped through earlier. The bars are frigid to the touch, no trace of her scent there, and Thor looks through them, into the dark forest beyond and grits his teeth. It’s cold, out here. Too cold. He has to move quickly.

He turns and makes his way through the courtyard, towards the front gate. His sharp eyes straining in the dark, though he could make the journey blind, having walked that path more times than he can count. He scans the ground before his feet as he goes, looking for something, anything. Any sign of her. 

All he sees is snow. Thick underfoot and gathering along the edges of the garden beds in great drifts shaped by the whipping wind. 

He lifts his nose on the air, squinting against the snowflakes that cling to his lashes and beard, searching but expecting to find nothing as he reaches the front gate and lifts his arm to find the latch overhead. He feels the gate give and then shoves his body against it. Pushing through the opening and stalking deliberately into the forest. 

The woods are densely planted, tree trunks near atop the tree trunk beside it, and the heavy cover overhead reduces the snow fall to a light dusting as Thor moves through the pines. Crouching as he moves, his nose lifted as he scents the cold air in hard, frigid puffs that freezes at his lungs and makes his beard go crisp with frost. The forest floor covered in soft pine needles and a thin layer of snow that melts beneath the press of his bare feet. Searching, his hands touching gently at the frozen ground as he slips silently through the trees. 

The wind is quieter too, a distant howl, and he pauses every minute or so to listen. Listening past the heavy thud of his heart and training his ears for something - anything - to indicate where she could be. 

Instinct drives him faster, his every sense sharpened to a fine point as he hunts. Wondering how far she could have gotten in bare feet and a thin cloak. Knowing that if she had any sense at all, she would have hit the trees and run as far as she could to be free of him, but not knowing how far she could have reasonably made it before succumbing to the cold. 

Any hope of finding her on the move fades as he makes a slow arc through the forest around the castle. Knowing which direction the village is himself but unsure if she knew - or if she would even choose to head that way at all. He begins to look down along the ground as he goes, his stomach souring as time passes and even he begins to feel the bite of the cold. 

He loses sense of time as he searches, lost to the instinct to find, to _keep_ , all of his senses working in sharp harmony as he searches blindly. Looking for a needle in a haystack. One girl in a sprawling forest. 

He follows no set track, casting left and right as he makes his way through the trees. His conscious mind switching softly off as the hunter in him takes over. Lifting his nose to the air and following whatever intuition he possesses. Feeling the ground for vibrations beneath his feet, his breath puffing steamy clouds before his face. 

Something warms on the breeze, then. Faint, just a whisper of something, and he stops, as if struck, and huffs the air. Looking, searching in the near black of the forest. He knows, all at once, that she’s here. _Close_ \- 

He follows his nose, crouching along the forest floor as his eyes sweep what’s in front of him. Moving faster now, his heart kicking hard behind his ribs. 

He lurches to a stop when he comes upon her. Curled up at the base of a large tree trunk, gone hollow with rot and age. 

There’s a light layer of snow over her and he reaches for her, his lungs constricting when he hears no sounds of life. She is icy to the touch, but startles under his hand. Gasping and lurching to life in an instant, and Thor nearly collapses with relief at the faint, sluggish sound of her heartbeat as she groans a wounded, fearful sound. 

He turns her towards him and feels the rigid set of her body, like cold stone under his hand, and he sees her face when she realizes it’s him. 

He expects fear. A dump of terror scent and a frantic scramble to get away. 

“Have you come to kill me?” she asks instead, her lips clumsy and slow and blue, and he curses, gritting his teeth. 

He gathers her in his arms, expecting her to struggle against him, but she turns to him at once. Pressing her face against the skin of his chest and gripping weakly at him. Not shivering. Only scarcely breathing as he rips the pelt from around his throat and wraps it around her in his arms. 

He takes off quickly, orienting himself back towards the castle instinctively when he heads initially in the wrong direction. At home here in his forests even in the near-black darkness of night. 

“Going to eat me,” she murmurs, and that draws a growl from him. Low and deep and tinged with something like fear as he grips her close and charges forward. 

The journey back is a blur. Weaving through dense tree cover in a path imprinted in the back of Thor’s mind, all but blind in the dark as he goes on feel and sound more than sight. When he breaks through the treeline and into the open air, the wind envelopes him at once in a frigid whirl. Catching at the pelt around her in his arms and flapping it, making him duck his chin against the crown of her head and grip her close as he sees the faint outline of the castle looming overhead and rushes forward. 

He slips through the gate, still open from when he’d first left, and doesn’t bother to close it behind him. Moving quickly now, straining to hear the sound of her breathing, of the beat of her heart, over the howling, bitter wind, and propelled by some drive he cannot understand. 

He shoves at the servant door with his shoulder, hard enough to splinter the wood around the latch, and barges in. Across the foyer and down the hall, up a sprawling staircase and to the left, and then he’s in the great hall. 

He moves to the front of the room at once, towards the stone fireplace that takes up nearly the entire easterly wall. The room is lit dimly with stray beams of moonlight that filter weakly through the shuttered windows overhead, and he crouches before the empty hearth. Drawing her away from his chest to look down at her face and rumbling anxiously at what he sees. 

Her eyes are on him, but not seeing him. Distant and dark in the pale landscape of her face. She is breathing, but only just, as she blinks up at him. 

He curses and tucks her gently against the stone floor. Pulling the pelt around her tight and touching at the icy smooth of her cheek before he’s going in a rush. Searching along the near wall, touching and pressing with the palms of his hands until a panel gives and pops back, opening into a small storage of firewood, only a few thin logs remaining there. 

He grabs a log and finds it blessedly dry, and then fills his arms. Crouching back to the hearth and wracking his brain, trying to remember - 

He hasn’t made a fire in years. Longer, maybe. Hasn’t used this hearth in longer still. 

He stacks the logs in a way that seems sensible, glancing back and finding her where he left her. Curled on the floor and covered in his pelt. Smelling like the dry, bitter of the wind howling against the walls of the castle. He goes back to the storage and grabs scraps of bark and shreds of wood along the floor, returning to the hearth and working it between the firewood.

Three strikes of flint, the first two sparking and failing, and the third with a little too much force, and a spark catches and takes. Smoke first, dark and winding up towards the chimney above, and then a small trick of flame. He watches, holding his breath, until the fire crackles, and a log surrenders to the flame, and then it all goes. Burning bright in the dark of the hall and casting long shadows along the floor. 

He lets out a breath and turns back to her. Crouching before her and turning her gently onto her back. She goes without resistance and something fierce coils in his chest. Tight and worried as he presses one palm to the curve of her cheek and the other over her sternum. Feeling at the sluggish pace of her heart. 

He has a singular moment where he looks up and considers the propriety, before he’s shoving the thoughts back and down. His chest rumbling on something of adrenaline as he pulls at her clothes. The cloak coming first, thick with ice and collapsing to the stone floor in a heavy heap when he sets it aside. Her tunic and breeches come next, the fabric painfully thin beneath his hands as he pulls them from her and discards them. Some undergarments remain, too thin to keep any significant chill to her skin, so he leaves them. 

She watches him, her lips parted and blue, blinking slowly, and her utter lack of reaction to the sight of him, monstrous and horned and towering over her, has him moving quickly. Laying down beside her on the pelt and curling around her. Pulling her tight against his chest and curling his thighs in. Surrounding her with the great bulk of his body, tucking his cheek down to press against the crown of her head. His heartbeat roaring against the faint whisper of hers as he goes very still. 

The fire burns high in the hearth, casting rolling waves of heat that wash over the both of them, and Thor forces his mind to go blank. Blinking into the bright red light of the flames and banishing thoughts as quickly as they come to mind. Latching instead onto the sound of her heart and the gentle, whisping puffs of her breath against his chest. Feeling the way her chest rises and falls on her slow, shallow inhales and exhales, frail like a bird beneath his weight. 

She warms slowly, between him and the fire, her skin going from icy to tepid. He nudges his nose along her ear, against her hairline, breathing her in and wishing desperately to give her his strength. 

A log cracks in the hearth, crumbling to glowing ash, and the moon travels slowly across the night sky. 

She stays still, pressed like a rag doll against his chest, until something shifts. She lets out a soft groan, and then shivers overtake her. Starting slowly at her core and then wracking through her, making her twitch against him and groan again as her teeth start to chatter and her fingers grip reflexively at where she’s pressed against him. 

Something shuddering unravels in his chest then, a rush of nauseating relief as she comes to trembling life, pressing her face against him, seeking his warmth on instinct, her toes curling against his shins. 

He wonders, for a moment, if her mind will come around then, too. If she’ll jerk upright in his arms and scream at the sight of him. 

But her mind is gone far from her, lost to the pull of the cold, and he finds himself grateful as he gathers her closer still. His chest rumbling softly as she whines and shivers against him, groaning softly and shifting against him. He tucks his cheek against hers and breathes her in, his arm curling tightly around her waist, his broad of his palm resting against the side of her throat. Wanting to soothe her as best he can as she shivers and whimpers softly in pain as her heart kickstarts back to life and blood begins to flow through frigid veins. 

She does not wake further. Her lips part against his skin, her breath coming in fast, hot little puffs, and Thor feels something loosen somewhere deep inside of him. Feeling her strength return to her with every drawing breath and knowing that she will pull through. 

He hopes, as he touches his nose to her hairline, that he will wake to find her gone. That the sun will rise and he’ll see that the storm outside has faded and find fresh footprints leading back into the forest, back towards the village. Back towards her home and her people and taking her warmth and scent and softness far away from him. 

He blinks slowly, feeling his heart rate finally begin to calm, and moves his mouth over her temple, and then back again. Feeling as she finally settles against him, her face tucked tightly against the crease of his underarm. Letting out a soft exhale that he feels in her whole body as the shivers begin to slowly fade to the healthy pull of her breathing. 

Tomorrow, she will return to her village and he will return to his solitude. To the empty, echoing ache of his existence here, as he must. As he should be. 

For now, he will stay here. Holding her close and bringing her back to life. Feeling the kick of her heart against his and opening his mouth over the scent of her along her jaw, unable to stop himself from breathing, breathing, breathing in the scent of her life. 


	2. Chapter 2

Thor does not wish to sleep, but it is an inevitable thing. Coming down from the coursing adrenaline of the search for her and the desperate bid to revive her feels like getting out from beneath a crushing weight, and the small curl of her in his arms is soothing beyond measure, the first touch of another he’s known in a decade, as the fire bathes them in continuous waves of gentle heat. 

He means to remain awake. To monitor her breathing and her heart and to ensure she comes back to herself fully, whenever she decides to rise. He does not mean to breathe in deep lungfuls of her scent, nor to let his legs tangle together with hers. 

And yet…

Thor wakes slowly at first, blinking into the pale morning light that’s sneaking through the gaps in the boarded windows, and then his heart nearly lurches from his chest as he remembers, all at once. The night before - the girl - 

She is there, still. On her side, her body curved like a crescent moon, nestled gently along the curl of his. Her cheek is pillowed on his arm, pale and still, and Thor’s breath catches in his lungs as he reaches to stroke the back of his knuckles down the side of her throat. 

A pulse beats there, lively and strong, and Thor’s eyes drop closed as a knot of relief unfurls in his chest. 

The fire has gone out, long ago from the looks of it, but she is deep in slumber, her eyelashes pale where they rest against the swell of her cheek. He lifts the pelt around them to look at her fingers and finds them pink and healthy, no sign of frost burn, and he finds himself shaking his head softly to himself. Watching his breath fog up the morning air as the true scale of his foolishness the night prior washes over him. As he realizes how incredible it is that it appears she will make it out unscathed. 

The thought makes a humorless sound lodge in Thor’s chest. Of her, returning to her village. Telling them of the beast that haunts the castle, who pinned her to the stone floor and roared in her face with the rage of a monster unbridled. Who banished her to a freezing death, only to change his mercurial mind and drag her back into his castle, before spending the night huffing heavily at her hairline and drinking in the feel of her skin greedily. 

Thor realizes then that his cock has thickened some, a faint, low simmering of arousal in his blood, and he pushes himself away from her at once. Letting out a ragged breath as he extricates himself from her, expecting her eyes to flash open at the rush of cold air that fills the space where he laid, but they do not. 

He squats beside her, down on his haunches, and watches as she curls in on herself. Gripping at the pelt and tugging it closer around her shoulders as she makes herself small against the stone floor. Letting out a long, even breath that sounds like a sigh as she falls even deeper into slumber. 

Thor has half a thought to restart the fire, looking to her clothing strewn about where he’d discarded it the night prior. Unsure if the coarse fur of the pelt and her undergarments are enough to keep her warm until she wakes, but she seems content, by every human measure that Thor can recall. 

His stomach growls, sudden and echoing in the vast expanse of the great hall, and he remembers that he has not eaten in nearly a day. 

He turns to go, to take to the woods and hunt, but something catches him before he can. Rooting him to the spot and turning him back towards where she’s wrapped snugly in his cloak. Allowing himself to watch her for a moment, feeling something in the pit of his belly sour at the realization that it will be the last. That, if she has any sense at all, she will be long gone by the time he returns. 

His stomach rumbles once more, loud enough that he thinks it may wake her, so he turns and goes. Something aching along his bones as he leaves the warmth and scent of her behind and steps out into the light of morning. 

The heavy snowfall of the night prior makes hunting so easy it's hardly sporting, and Thor can’t bring himself to complain as he tracks easy, plain footprints of hare through the woods and finds them where the tracks end. Hunkered down deep in banks of snow in little dens, barely able to utter a shrill shriek before Thor is dispatching them with a rough pin and a rip of his jaws. 

He moves at a slower pace than usual, relishing in the creak of the snow under his bare feet and the sting of the cold air as he takes in deep lungfuls of breath. Feeling his head clear from the cloud of scent that had enveloped them both over the night and gripping to that clarity with everything he has. The bright copper tang of blood in his mouth helps in this regard, and by the time the sun is climbing in the morning sky and he has seven white hare gripped in his fists, he feels more himself than before. Returning to the beast that he is, blood frosting up where it coats his beard. 

He usually eats his kill where he fells them, crouching over them in the forest and rending meat from bone with his teeth, but he brings them back to the castle this time, for reasons he will not allow himself to consider. 

The storm from the night before has rolled on, leaving crisp, still winter air in its wake, and Thor allows himself to enjoy the feeling of the sun on his face as he makes his way back. Latching the front gate behind him and moving through the courtyard. The hare gripped in his fist leaving a trail of dripping blood. Bright red and hot against the fresh snow underfoot. 

There are no footprints in the courtyard, save for those he left on his way out to the woods, but he does not take note of that. He does not. 

Inside the castle, he grits his teeth against the impulse to go check the great hall, to see if she is still there, and he turns instead in the opposite direction. Headed to the kitchen, for the sole reason that it is on the other end of the castle from where he saw her last. 

He leaves wet footprints on the stone floor as he goes, the prey in his hands leaving a bloody trail behind. 

He hasn’t used the kitchen in as long as he can remember and it takes him a moment to recall the steps needed to find it. Where to turn left, then right, and right again, until he’s crossing underneath a stone arch and stepping into the bright, open room. 

He never cared to board this room up, with it so far out of his usually tread paths in the castle, and the windows are streaming with bright light, casting golden beams across the abandoned tables and counters, covered with a heavy layer of dust and littered with the pots and pans that were used back when this castle held any life at all. 

He takes one of the hares clutched in his fist and lifts it, taking the skull between his teeth and separating it with a clench of his jaw and a jerk of his head. 

And then he hears a soft inhale of a gasp and the crash of glass on the stone floor. 

He spins, his teeth bared reflexively as his heart slams against his ribs on a sudden, deafening rush. The instinct to fight - _fight_ \- as strong as his need to breathe. 

She is there, only half visible as she stands, frozen, in the narrow doorway of his pantry. At her feet is a jar of pickled something, shattered and spreading liquid lazily across her bare feet. 

They stand, on opposite sides of the room, staring at each other, both a little breathless. 

Thor feels blood from the severed rabbit’s head between his teeth trickle down his beard, and he resists the urge the stupid urge to turn and flee. Trapped here, by the intensity of her eyes on him. Not looking away. Not cringing or turning. Regarding him with eyes that are wide and white around the edges, but...not brimming with fear. 

She moves first. Touching her hand to her chest, then her throat, a little nervously. Stepping to the side to avoid the shattered glass, looking down to the mess at her feet and then back up at Thor. 

“I’m...sorry,” she says. Her voice is clear like a rung bell. “I’ve been a terrible guest.” 

Thor blinks at that. Frowning, his brow creasing in a flicker of confusion. “Guest,” he says, after a moment, his voice a deep-pitched rumble that barely makes it out of his mouth. 

She shrugs a little, her hand still at the base of her throat. “Well, first I broke into your home,” she says. “Now I’ve broken...whatever that was. And I appear to have startled you.” The corners of her mouth turn up at that, just for a moment, before they fall again.

Thor watches her, his mind whirring in a tangled loop. Unable to process what is happening. Why she’s still here in his castle. Why she hasn’t screamed at the sight of him, or fainted in a heap on the ground. Why she’s speaking to him, calmly, as one would speak to anyone, as hare’s blood drips down his throat and onto the floor below. 

He works the rabbit skull between his teeth. Cracking it on a hard bite and swallowing it down whole, all the while keeping his eyes fixed on her. Expecting her to bolt. To do something. 

She watches him but she does not shrink away, even as he can hear the bird-like flutter of her racing heart. The stench of terror from her, the scent he couldn’t clear from his senses from before in the foyer, is nowhere to be found on the cool air. 

“In truth,” she says. “I don’t know how I’m here. I thought...I meant to have left. Last night.” 

He lets out a quiet breath. “You did,” he says, quietly. Remembering. 

Confusion crosses her face, then. “I woke here,” she says. “Wrapped in your cloak.” 

Thor looks away. Down to the floor, then out the window. Gripping his fist around the prey in his hand and then loosening, grateful to be standing in the corner, in the cast of a shadow so that she can perhaps not make out the particulars of his form. 

“Did you bring me back here?” she asks, her expression twisted on something he can’t read. 

She crosses the room on slow, halting steps. Inching closer to him while her instincts likely scream at her to get as far from him as possible. All the while looking at him, her brow furrowed, trying to catch his gaze. 

She stops before him, a few feet away, and Thor takes a step back. Turning his head to remain hidden in shadow, unable to avoid the smell of spring that’s warming the air of the room, that he knows now is just the scent of her. He growls, low and deep, in warning, but she stays rooted to her spot before him. 

“Did…” she says, her voice trailing soft with confusion. “Did you save my life?” 

His eyes cut to hers then, on a hard shake of his head. Anger welling quickly in his chest in a sudden rush, at himself. His mind flashing to the sight of her curled up at the base of a tree, covered in snow. Her heart beating sluggish and slow...

“I nearly killed you,” he mutters, casting his eyes down. Catching helplessly on the sight of her bare feet, pale against the stone and dark with dried mud. 

She watches him, frowning into the shadow where he stands, his shoulders hunched in with dead rabbits clutched in his hand. Her voice is soft when she speaks again. 

“May I see you?” 

He lifts his head, his heart doing something stupid in his chest. Twisting and tumbling, the ground seeming to shift beneath his feet as he tries to make sense of this conversation. To make sense of her. 

A snort catches in his throat, stupefied. “Surely you’ve heard stories.” He can only imagine the tales those in the village must weave over campfires. 

She nods softly, still frowning at him in the light streaming through the windows. “I have.”

He snorts again. “Then you know all there is to know.” 

She shifts on her feet, as if to take a step forward, but seems to think better of it. Her fingers touch still at the base of her throat. At the race of her pulse there. A nervous habit, it seems, even as she stands her ground and pins him in a corner with nothing more than the thin set of her shoulders and the strength of her gaze. 

“They told me you would kill me on sight,” she says, and something plunges in Thor’s chest like a stone through the surface of water. He stands up farther, his brow drawing. A frown to match hers slipping across his face and tugging at his tusks. 

“But you didn’t,” she says, her expression shifting like gears are turning in her mind. “You were angry, but I suppose that’s fair. I was an intruder.” 

A growl rumbles in his chest. Frustrated. Not tracking this conversation. Where it’s going or what she means by it. He has said this many words at once in longer than he can remember and it makes his ribs ache. “I sent you into a storm to die.” 

She shakes her head. Resolute. “You saved my life. You kept me warm.” 

His heart thuds. “You remember?” 

A helpless expression crosses her face. “A little...now, maybe. I think so. I think...I think I know your smell.” 

He exhales hard, shaking his head, and takes a hard step forward. Something seizing up tight in his chest at her words and driving him forward and forward, one step, then two towards her, until she’s taking a stumbling step back and looking up with wide eyes to take him in. Standing in a bright beam of sunlight, his chest puffing as he looks down at her. 

He needs her to fear him. He needs her to _go_. 

He rises to his full height, there in the open sun, and squares his shoulders. Looks down at her and waits for her to recoil. To flinch, or retreat. 

There’s a faint tremble to her breath, he can hear it, as she looks up at him. Blinking against the dust motes floating in the air as her eyes traverse him slowly. Taking him in as her mouth falls softly open. Drifting from the thick root of horns deep in his skull, thick and spiraling slowly backward, down to the tusks jutting up from his jaw. To the blood thickening up in his beard, smeared over his lips and chin and dripping, still, to the floor. Catching on the thick pelt of hair across his chest and down his belly, disappearing into the waistband of a pair of what were once breeches, but are now a tattered approximation of clothing. Her eyes catch and linger on his hands, clenched by his sides. Stained red with rabbit blood and muddied with dirt. 

She shakes her head then. Her eyes catching his and holding them, letting out a small breath as she does. “I…” she says, her voice going soft. “When I woke this morning and you weren’t there, I found myself…” Her voice dies in her throat, like she’s trying to find words. 

He needs her to go. He needs her to _leave_. Or he won’t be able to let her. 

“I saw you, last night. I know. Before,” she says. Taking a small step towards him that he very nearly flinches back from. “But when I woke I couldn’t...remember. It felt like a dream.” 

_A nightmare_ , he thinks, but doesn’t trust himself to speak, something cinching up tight behind his ribs. 

She shakes her head again. Sure of herself now. “You’re not...you’re nothing like they said you would be.”

Thor doubts that very much but says nothing. Stuck in a silent stand-off with a slip of a girl that has all of his nerve endings feeling raw and over exposed. 

Her stomach grumbles. Softly, barely audible, and she doesn’t react at all. Continuing to take in the sight of him, her mind clearly turning over itself with a mess of thoughts she is struggling to articulate. 

He frowns. 

She shakes her head, like she’s not concerned about it, but it goes again. Growling, louder this time, and she lets out a soft, humorless sound and looks away. Out the window, into the sunlight. 

Thor looks to the rabbits gripped in his fist, then back to her. Her words ring in his mind. As clear as if she’d screamed them.

_They told me you would kill me on sight._

He remembers, watching her pretend like she’s not clenching her abdominal muscles beneath her tunic to stop her belly from grumbling, her telling him the night before - that she couldn’t go back. 

The laughter comes back to him, then. Of the riders who had trampled the snow outside of his front gate the day prior. The cruelty in the man’s voice when he had screamed back for Thor before spurring his horse into the woods and away from the keep. Trying to antagonize him. To call him forward from the dark, empty halls of his castle in a fit of rage.

To...kill her. That had been their aim. Leaving her there on the precipice of a building storm on the doorstep of a monster with no way to defend herself and no hope to survive. 

She must see the heat flare in his face, his expression drawing sour and dark, because she speaks again. 

“I’m sorry,” she says. Like she understands his anger, thinking it to be directed towards her. She looks over to where glass is still shattered on the stone floor, the pickled contents strewn in a sloppy pile where the jar had crashed. “I just...wasn’t sure I could make the journey without something. It wasn’t mine to take.”

Something is settling in Thor’s chest. Something he can’t see but can feel, shifting gently into place. Something sure. 

“Where would you have gone?” he asks. It comes out a huff. Rumbling deep and animalistic. 

She shrugs, the corner of her mouth going a little straight. Looking again out the window. 

He snorts softly, his eyes going back to the bare of her feet on the stone tile below. They must be freezing, even here inside the keep. She would lose them from the cold, if she left like that. She’d make it a mile, maybe two, before she would have to stop and try to warm them with her hands and breath. A futile gesture, but her only choice. If she were to leave. 

He lets out a breath. A quiet, resigned one, and steps past her. Around the edge of the long oak table in the center of the room, still littered with cooking utensils he hasn’t used in a decade. He clears a spot with the back of his hand and lays the rabbits out there. 

He takes the first, the one whose head he had swallowed down and works his fingers underneath the collar of it’s skin. Separating the pelt from the muscle around the creature’s neck and then gripping tight and tugging down. It pulls from the muscle and bone like a sheet, easy under the strength under his hand, and he works the feet next. Finding the last joint of each leg and twisting the feet off one by one, so the pelt can come free. He leaves the pelt and the feet, white furred and bloody, in a pile on the table, and turns the rabbit over onto its back, to work open the chest cavity and remove the guts. 

He hasn’t dressed a kill like this in...longer than he can think. Longer than his memory goes back, but the motion is somehow still familiar to his hands. 

She had turned in place to watch him and he senses more than sees as she starts to back away. Not in fear, no - her heart rate steady and slow, her scent fresh and bright, but apparently to go. Thinking him to be dismissing her as he bloodies his hands with hare carcass. 

It makes something of a laugh catch in his chest. The idea that he would bother with dressing a kill so before consuming it, but he supposes she doesn’t know that he usually eats out in the woods. Devouring the prey whole, crouched over the ground as blood drips from his tusks. 

“Can you build a fire?” he asks, to stop her before she reaches the arched doorway of the kitchen, and her eyes go to his. Confused, her hand still touching at the hollow of her throat. 

“I...know how to build a fire,” she says, slowly. 

He scoops the stomach and intestines from the chest of the rabbit with a swipe of curled finger and deposits them along with the fur. “The hearth,” he says, tilting his head to indicate the expansive stone fireplace on the wall behind him. “There should be firewood there.” 

She stares at him for a moment, confusion plain on her face, before she seems to concede. Thinking, perhaps, that she owes him at least this to account for her breaking in and taking his food.

She steps lightly past him, her feet whisper quiet on the stone as she comes around him to the hearth behind, and Thor goes back to the task at hand. Finishing the first rabbit and moving to the second. Separating the head from the neck with his teeth and a hard tug, his ears training hard on the sounds of her moving behind him. Dropping to her knees and pulling at the pile of firewood that’s stacked beside the hearth. 

They work in silence, their backs to each other, and the work of dressing the hare is mindless enough that Thor can’t keep himself from taking note of every piece of her he can feel. The soft sound of her taking her lower lip in her teeth as she stacks firewood deep in the belly of the fireplace. The melody of her heartbeat, familiar to him somehow, already, like he could pick it out of a hundred. The scent of her cuts through the copper tang of the blood that’s still soaked into his beard, bright and fresh and new, and he can’t help but draw it in on deep breaths through his nose as he works. Able to parse it out from the surrounding air even as the first tendrils of smoke fill the hearth, flame catching and licking along the kindling she placed at the base of the firewood. 

He dresses three of the hare for her. Strips them down until they’re nothing but muscle over slick bone, then turns and places them along the steel grate above the flickering flame below in the hearth. He turns to the remaining four, laid out on the table and gone cold, and he lets out a quiet breath. His stomach gripping with hunger but knowing that he will not eat here. Not in front of her. 

He takes the remaining prey in his hand and moves back around the table. Stopping when he hears her turn to watch him go. Hears the catch of her breath in her throat as he moves away from her. 

“It’s…” he says, turning to look at her over his shoulder. Finding her kneeling by the hearth, looking as if she means to push to her feet and follow him. “Those are for you. Eat your fill, once they’re done.” 

He goes then. Turning and stepping beneath the doorway of the kitchen and disappearing into the belly of the castle. Some distant part of him thinking she didn’t want him to go, and needing to banish the thought at once. Absurd. 

He moves mindlessly through the castle, down through the foyer and then out the servant door. Taking a deep, open-mouthed breath of the crisp air when he steps outside, and taking a few steps to get to the center of the courtyard before dropping to a comfortable squat and taking the head of a rabbit between his teeth and tearing. 

He eats in silence. Tearing through fur and flesh and bone with the great strength of his jaws and chewing methodically. His mind a mess of thoughts, tussling and turning over themselves as his stomach grumbles gratefully at the first food he’s tasted in over a day. Blood coats his hands and soaks his beard, the fine white fur of the hare sticking against it, and a cool twist trickles in on the breeze. 

Thor lifts his head and scents, watching as the trees beyond his castle gates bend gently with a gently rising wind. More weather on the way, then. Not till nightfall, likely, but more wind, and on it, a fresh, frigid cover of snow. 

That settles it, then. Thor moves to the last of them, crunching through bone, and he chances a look up. Over his shoulder, to the eastern edge of the castle where the kitchen hall is nestled. 

He sees her there. Her face pressed up against the glass, looking down at him below in the courtyard. Squatting over a patch of snow stained red with blood and littered with carcass, eating raw flesh like a feral creature. 

He shakes his head. Sighs, as he finishes the last of it. Scrubbing his palms down into the snow and scooping up two palms full to his beard. Pressing it to his cheeks and chin and scrubbing lightly, feeling it melt between the press of his hands and come away pink and slushed. Washing away at least some of the smell the kill. At least some of the stain of it. 

He scrubs one last hand over his mouth and stands, pushing himself to his full height, and when he looks up at her again, her face disappears. Dropping out of sight of the window, like she was caught looking. Something funny flips in his chest and he shoves it back and down. Away, as he makes his way back inside, his belly pleasantly full and his mind settled with whatever measure of a plan he’s worked up. 

He finds her in the kitchen where he left her, her lips shiny with grease, the carcasses of the hare laid out on the table and stripped clean. 

When she sees him cross through the doorway, she smiles, a soft flash of teeth, and he forces himself to look away. Feeling that same flutter in his chest as before and shaking his head softly to clear it. Not allowing it to take root. 

He stands there, a little unsure of what to say. The mess from the broken jar is gone, just a wet smear on the stone remaining. She presses her fingers to her lips, a soft, awkward smile quirking across her mouth as she wipes the last of the grease off and then onto the hem of her tunic. 

“That was...lovely, thank you,” she says, looking to him. Meeting his eye and speaking to him as if he is anyone. Nothing in her expression to show that she’s standing a few scant feet from a monster of whom stories are written and shared as tales of terror. 

He shifts on his feet. “Was it enough?” he asks. His voice begun to go raspy from use. 

Something flirts across her face, another hint of a smile, and he breathes through another swell of feeling at the sight of it, clenching his jaw.

“Yes,” she says, her voice pitching into something that sounds softly teasing. “Three fully grown rabbits was plenty. You can send me on my way with no reservations.” 

He frowns. Shakes his head. “Another storm will come. Tonight.” 

She pauses at that. Watching him from across the kitchen. Trying, clearly, to read him, and finding it a difficult task. 

“Do you mean for me to stay?” she asks.

He breathes out through his nose. Slowly. Carefully. “If you wish to.” 

He does not allow himself to consider her rejecting this offer. To envision her stepping out into the bleak unknown, squinting against the rising, bitter winds to put as much distance as she can between herself and him. Unsure, in his core, if he would allow her to do so. Unwilling to let himself picture him clutching her to his chest and growling, to keep her inside and warm and safe and _with him_.

But she nods. Watching him. No doubt seeing his internal struggle play out over his face. “If...if that would be alright. I don’t remember much of last night but it wasn’t...it wasn’t pleasant.” 

Something twists on the air, just a light wisp of stress, and he roots himself to his spot to stop himself from moving towards her. He goes over the layout of the castle in his mind. Trying to remember which rooms hold what. Trying to recall which would make a suitable place for her. Which would have a bed and a hearth and a wardrobe for her to choose from. His eyes fall to her feet, again, pale and thin on the stone floor, and it’s a wonder she’s not shivering. He forces his gaze to return to hers. 

He chews on a thought. Opening his mouth and then closing it, watching her eyes track the movement. She waits. Gives him time. 

“I won’t hurt you,” he says at last. Needing her to know, somehow. To know that this isn’t some plot to lock her away and prey upon her in the night. 

The corner of her mouth lifts and then drops. A whisper of a smile. “I know,” she says. Like she believes him, and he breathes out. Looks away from her, until he hears the sound of her speaking again. 

“What’s your name?” 

He lifts his head at that. His brow drawing down on his face and then back up as something leaps in his belly. A little stunned and warm. 

“Beast,” he says, finally. His voice rough, like gravel. 

Her head tips to the side. Just a little. “That’s what they call you,” she says. “That’s not your name.”

It’s easier to leave than to take in the look on her face, the soft question there, so he does. He turns and goes, through the kitchen doorway and into the castle, and he feels a shudder of faint relief when he hears the sound of her feet on the stone behind him. Following him into the belly of the keep, her heart a steady drumbeat in his ears. 

He decides on a bedroom down the hall from his own. Far enough that she needn’t fear his presence, yet close enough that...well. Close enough that he could be there. If she needed him to be.

It takes leaning his shoulder against the door to budge it open, the hinges gone rusty with disuse, but he’s pleased to find the room as he remembered it. Large, and lit with floor to ceiling windows on the far side. He goes to them, crossing the room, and draws the curtains back. Wrinkling his nose at the dust that puffs into the air as he draws them open and secures them on either side of the glass. Letting bright beams of afternoon light cut across the room and through the shadow there. 

When he turns back, he finds her at the side of the bed. It’s a small one, not meant for more than one person, and the bedding has a fine layer of dust over the top of it, but she’s touching at the bedding with careful fingers. Looking up at him like it’s too much, and he bites back the urge to tell her it’s anything but. 

There’s a wardrobe beside the window and Thor goes to it, pulling the open the large doors over the top of several dresser drawers, breathing out in a quiet relief to space packed tight with clothes. Gowns and cloaks and shifts, all hung on delicate hangers carved of dark wood and pressed in tightly together. All along the bottom of the chest, tucked beneath the hanging clothes, are the object of his search. 

He hands her a pair of slippers, soft doeskin stitched together with fine leather string and lined with soft, brown fur, and turns away. Going to the fireplace along the wall and sniffing around for firewood, finding none. He makes a note to search for more before sundown, before the gripping cold returns and the next storm blows in and fills the halls with a bitter, frigid ache. 

He turns and finds her standing there, holding the slippers in her hands. Looking at them, then back at him. 

“I can’t wear these,” she says, her face creasing on a soft frown. 

Thor looks to her feet, then at the slippers in her hands. They should fit, he thinks. 

“They’re…” she stops, running her thumb over the seam along the heel. “They’re too lovely. My feet are filthy. I would ruin them.” 

Thor looks to her feet, pale against the stone and spattered faintly with mud. He looks to his own and finds them nearly black with filth. The product of roaming barefooted through the woods for a decade, only ever washed by occasional river crossings and trudges through freshly fallen snow. 

He huffs softly. Without humor, looking to his hands and finding them in similar condition. Something occurs to him though. Seeing the blood and black of dirt caked under his fingernails, and he makes a thoughtful sound. 

He wonders, if they still work, after all this time, and he doesn’t need to listen when he turns to leave the room that she will follow. Trailing him silently into the hall like a whisper of a fresh spring breeze.

Torchlight lights the way down a set of spiral, stone stairs, and Thor has half a mind to ask her if she has any survival instincts at all as she follows him down into the pitch black of the caverns below the castle. 

The air thickens and heats as Thor makes his way slowly down and it sparks a tiny flicker of hope behind his ribs. Maybe, after all this time…

The caves below the castle are home to a natural hot spring, hand-carved pools in the dark stone filling with steaming hot water when the channel is opened and the water diverted inward. Thor hasn’t thought of the springs in years or used them in even longer, but the smell of mineral filling his nose as they descend makes him think that the earth has been churning on all this time.

She bumps against his back when they reach the bottom of the stairs, the bulk of his body blocking the meager light of the torch, and Thor holds out a hand unconsciously to steady her. “Stay here,” he says, and then makes his way along the stone wall to the right. 

Torches are posted there, great wooden spears soaked in kerosine and resting in iron cradles, and he lights them one by one. Moving down the hall as he goes, squinting as each torch lights in a crackling blaze. 

It takes a few minutes to light them all, the area expansive and open and covered in a fine, warm mist that makes the surface of his skin gleam in the torchlight. Once the space is flickering in soft, orange light, Thor makes his way to the far wall, where a heavy stone wheel juts from the craggy rock, wooden spokes rooted deep along the curve of it. 

He tests it, taking two spokes in hand and leaning against it, and it takes him throwing most of his weight to make the wheel budge. Slowly, stone grinding against stone, but then it gives with a soft whine, and the sound of rushing water fills the air. 

Thor steps back and pushes his hair back from his face, the corners of his mouth lifting for a second, a little breathless, as steaming water rushes into the room from deep channels carved into the dark stone underfoot. Directing to each of the three pools spread across the cavern, filling them with hot, fragrant water. 

When the water sloshes near the edge of the pools, spilling over onto the smooth stone floor, Thor heaves against the spoked wheel once more, until the water streaming in trickles to a stop. Steam has filled the space, heated and dense, and Thor makes his way back around the room. Stooping to touch at the scattering of little glass jars left around the edges of the pools and finding them stoppered tight with cork and still sloshing with liquid oil within, preserved from time and still usable, with any luck. 

By the time he makes it back to her, her hand is touching at her throat again. He stops short of her, frowning, but finds her heartbeat steady. No fear in her scent, as it diffuses in the thickening air, but her mouth has fallen open all the same as she takes in the sight before her. 

She looks to Thor after a long moment. “What is this?” 

He blinks at her. Looking over at the pools. “Baths.” 

She steps slowly to the edge of the nearest pool and drops slowly to one knee. Touching her fingers to the water and jerking her hand back when she finds it steaming hot. She looks to Thor. Stunned. 

“These are to bathe in?” 

Thor nods, a little confused, but then her face brightens on pure, genuine wonderment, and a small flare of shame trickles down his spine. At what he, apparently, took for granted. Continues to take, really. 

She lets her hand submerge into the water and her face splits on a smile. “Incredible,” she murmurs. Swirling her hand around in it. “I’ve never...not in warm water.” 

He looks away, feeling something stir in his chest and not wishing to address it. Taking a step back from where she’s knelt beside the pool and touching gently at the surface of the water. 

“Do you know the way back?” he asks, and her head lifts. “To the room from before.” Your room, he thinks but doesn’t say. 

She nods, her brow creasing softly in the flickering torchlight. 

He nods, shifting on his feet. Looking to the doorway that leads to the stairway up and the back to her. “You may bathe here, if you wish. There is clean clothing in the room - it is yours to choose from.” 

She’s frowning now. Her fingers touching against her pulse. Looking like she’s about to push herself to her feet. “Where will you go?” 

It takes a moment for Thor to realize that the thin tendril of stress scent he senses on the air is not from fear of him. Breathe catches in his lungs, a heavy knot of it, when he realizes that she wishes for him to stay, and he pushes himself back another step. Shaking his head softly, his eyes squeezing closed for a moment. Unable to…

He nearly stumbles when he steps back again, and he means to say something. To tell her that he will return. That he needs to hunt once more and gather wood for a fire in her room so she doesn’t freeze in the night. 

But when he opens his mouth, a low rumbling growl comes from somewhere deep in his chest. Unwanted and unbidden, but there all the same, and he turns quickly, and goes. Leaving her behind in the thickening steam, unable to hear when she calls out for him as he disappears up the staircase. 

Thor stumbles blindly through the castle until he makes it outside, pulling in a rasping breath of frigid air and nearly groaning in relief at the cold crunch of snow beneath his bare feet. The wind is bitter and rising, promising a coming storm to rival the one the night prior, and turns his face into the gust and shakes his head hard. Needing desperately to clear the scent of her from there, willing the whipping wind to take it from him. 

He goes to the woods, the forest around his keep a familiar, comforting thing, and he runs. He has no direction or particular aim but forges forward all the same. Weaving between great trees and bouldering formations of rock, sliding down to all fours when he slips on the slushy snow below before pushing himself up and taking off again. The woods are a hushed thing, creatures bedded down to prepare for the coming cold and the thick conifer cover overhead covering the space in a hushed silence, even as the wind begins to howl overhead. 

Thor goes and goes, relishing the burn of his lungs as he travels a mile, then two, aimless in the endless spread of the forest. Going down no particular path, just needing...chasing...

He bursts through a dense line of trees into a clearing and allows himself to slow, from a sprint to a trot and then finally to a stop. Nearly doubling over as his chest heaves on great bellows of breath, drawing in deep lungfuls of cold air and breathing out through an open mouth, his tusks frosting up against his lips and sticking. Spots dotting in and out of his vision as he tilts his head back and looks up at the sky. Letting the first falling flakes of snow brush over his cheeks and dampen his beard. 

He stays there for a long while. Feeling the growing wind tug back and forth around the broad of his shoulders, turning his face into the wind to let the cold wash over him as his breath slowly returns to him. 

Out here, he feels himself. Surrounded by wild nature and no other living thing for miles, bathing in the unforgiving freeze of a bitter winter. Feeling the cold distantly against his bare skin, feet and chest and hands, and clinging to the feeling of it. 

He...wants her to stay. He knows that now, and the knowledge feels like a molten stone sitting heavy in his belly. Dangerous and foolish, but there. Rooted in him and unlikely to waver. 

The sun is obscured by clouds, heavy with snow and drifting slowly, but is close to touching the tops of the trees on the far side of the clearing. Thor takes in one last breath, deep and chilled, and then turns back towards the forest. Making his way back through the treeline and lifting his nose against the air as his eyes fall to the ground and begin to search. Knowing that his window to find live prey is closing with every passing hour, their tracks to be obscured with fresh snow as the storm rolls in. 

He wants her to stay. But he cannot make her. He will not make her. That, he knows, as he spots fresh prints in the snow and pivots to follow them, moving quickly through the hush of the forest. His castle can remain a safe place for her, as long as she wishes to remain. Whether that is for the night, or for…

Thor shakes his head and snaps his teeth, an echoing clack sounding through the air over the slush of his feet on the snow, and he forces his mind to the task at hand. Turning quickly left, then right, and following the trail as it splits in several directions. His heart beginning to thud in his chest as he gives over to the instinct of the hunt. 

It feels good to let it take him over. To settle back into the beast that he is and to remind himself that he is nothing but, no matter how she looks at him. 

He wasted too much time sprinting through the woods to get his head on straight, and the hunt is poorly for it. He ends up with two hare and a blessedly large snow goose he’d managed to snag as it had taken startled flight at his approach. All three would make a modest meal for him on a normal day, but he knows as he slips back through the front gate that he will eat what she does not, and that it will be enough. 

There was no time to gather wood for a fire for her room, and as Thor crosses the courtyard and blinks snow from his eyes, he hopes there is enough left in storage in the great hall to get her through the night. 

The wind howls behind him as he tugs the servant door closed, the storm building in earnest now, and he can’t stop himself from pausing there in the foyer. Prey gripped in his hands and dripping blood to the floor, as he realizes that she’s there on the air. Faint, but unmistakable to his nose. The typically stale, cold air brushing with something lighter. Something fresher and brighter than the stagnant scent that looms heavy through every hall. 

He breathes out through his nose, a controlled, quiet exhale, and makes his way to the kitchen. 

When he crosses through the archway, she’s there, back in the depths of the pantry, but she hears him enter and turns to see him. Another smile then, dimpling her cheeks, and he is trapped by it. Stood just inside the archway of the door and standing there, stupid and silent, as her face brightens with something like relief at the sight of him. Hulking and monstrous and holding bloodied prey, but she steps from the pantry and utters a soft greeting that is sweet to his ears. 

She is dressed in a plain gown, the color of an evergreen tree and cinched simply at the waist. When she moves towards him he can see that she’s wearing the slippers, her feet whisper-soft against the stone, and something shudders in his chest that feels warm. Pleased. Her hair is damp but drying, and she touches a little nervously to her waist when she sees his eyes on her. Taking her in. 

“I hope - I hope it’s alright,” she says, smoothing the dress down. “I washed my clothes in the bath and they are drying. I picked the simplest I could find - it’s - lovely.” 

He nods, hoping that to be affirmation enough, not trusting himself to speak in the moment. It must be, for her expression shifts, her eyes going to the bird gripped in his palm. 

“Oh,” she says, breathing out. “That’s magnificent. You...caught that?”

Thor looks to the bird, it’s snow white feathers dampening with melting snow. “Will it do?” He wonders if she ate goose, in her former life. Back in the village. He usually doesn’t bother with them, finding the feathers too much a hassle to eat out in the forest, but he wanted to give her something other than hare. 

A soft huff of laughter puffs from her lips. She looks at him like she can’t quite understand him. “It’s for me?” 

Thor nods. 

She shakes her head then. Her brow drawing gently in a look that reads a little puzzled. She smooths her palms down her dress again. “I…” She takes a step towards him and holds out her hands. 

He passes it to her, watching an emotion he doesn’t know shift across her face as she takes it in hand. 

“I haven’t had snow goose since I was a child,” she admits, finally, her voice gone a little soft. “It was a treat my father would make for the solstice.” She looks up at Thor’s face, and he wonders to himself if he’ll ever adjust to the utter lack of repulsion she has to looking upon him. Meeting his eyes and smiling softly. “Can I prepare it for you?” she asks. “I haven’t since I was a girl, but I remember.” 

He nods again and she grins in what looks like achingly sincere delight before she turns and brings the bird to the table. Clearing a space for it and searching the tabletop for something. She finds a knife, small and sharp-bladed, and makes a satisfied sound with her mouth. Turning the bird over onto its back and considering it, her mouth twisting in thought. 

Thor forces himself forward then and goes to the far end of the table. Beginning to strip the first hare of it’s pelt and clenching his jaw to ignore the way her happiness feels in the room. Palpable on the air and warm, as she places the knife beside the goose and begins to work at the feathers over the breast instead. Plucking them with nimble fingers that appear practiced in the motion. 

She loses herself in the task before long and begins to hum a soft melody as she works, and Thor tears a rabbit head from it’s neck with his teeth and focuses on the copper of blood in his mouth instead of the sweetness of the sound of her voice as it lifts and falls in a whisper, filling the space between them with a quiet song. 

Thor dresses both hare in a few minutes, stripped until they are nothing but muscle over bone, and stoops next to build a fire. Using the last of the firewood there begrudgingly, making a note to himself to go from room to room before the night’s end to search for more. By the time he has a flame going, catching and crackling on the dry wood, she is carving careful slices of thick muscle from the bird. Breast and thigh, dark and bloody, and the sight makes Thor’s traitorous stomach very nearly grumbles at the sight. 

They roast the hare and goose both over the fire and she busies herself once the meat begins to glisten and crackle over the open flame. Showing some apparent faint discomfort at the prospect of standing still, or at staying close to him, Thor’s not sure, moving to gather the loose feathers and innards strewn along the table. 

The wind howls outside the glass-paned windows as darkness begins to slowly fall and Thor looks to the snow rushing past them in hurtling, twisting gusts. He allows himself a quiet moment to be grateful that she is here. Puttering around the kitchen, still humming quietly to herself, her cheeks a little rosy from the heat thrown off of the roaring fire. Warm and safe and not out in the bitter cold. 

It cooks quickly, hot juices pooling to the table below when Thor takes them from the flame and lets them rest, and he goes a little distant in his mind, then. Knowing the castle has dishware, somewhere. Forks and knives and plates, and he is taking a step back, frowning and trying to remember where those would be, when she lets out a happy sound and digs into one of the hare with her bare hands. Ripping roasted meat from the bone and pressing it past her lips and groaning softly at the flavor. 

He’s content to watch her, to listen to the quiet sounds of pleasure coming from her as she takes a small bite of goose breast, but she looks up to him. Eyes warm and expectant. She motions for him to join her, and the lie that he’d already eaten out in the woods dies on his tongue at the openness of her expression. 

So they stand together at the long table in the kitchen, lit by the setting sun and the blazing fire in the hearth, and eat. It’s strange, the flavor of cooked meat. A distant memory for Thor, of a time before, and he finds he can only stomach so much before his belly begins to churn. 

She doesn’t appear to notice, and for that he is grateful as he watches her eat her fill. The first hare disappears, and then the second, and nearly half of the goose before she is shaking her head softly and touching her hand to her belly. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever eaten so much in one day,” she says, her voice warming on a laugh, but he can’t find the humor in it. His eyes training helplessly on the thin set of her shoulder beneath her gown and barely resisting the impulse to urge her to eat more. 

“Thank you,” she says. Seeking his gaze and holding it when he gives it, even though the naked sincerity in her eyes makes him want to look away. “I can never...I’ll never be able to repay you for this kindness. It is undeserved.” 

He says nothing to that, because the words that spring to his tongue are foolish, but her eyes remain soft as she regards him. 

They stand there, the silence that falls between them feeling like something strange and new. The events of the last day play in Thor’s mind as he looks at her, the day prior feeling like a year ago to him now. The first scent of her fear bitter and acrid to his nose, the sight of her curled up beneath him on his cold, stone foyer floor. To now, standing a few feet from him. A light smear of juice on her chin that he aches to touch away but resists. Her scent filling all of his senses, making him feel a little drunk with it as she looks at him like he is nothing at all to fear. 

He lets out a quiet breath. “You do not fear me,” he says. Unable to hide the lilt of confusion in his voice at the statement. 

Her brows draw a little at that, a twist of something shifting across her face. “I do not,” she agrees. 

A huff lodges somewhere in his throat. “You should fear me.” 

All he can see is the size of him compared to her. Looking down at her in the small space of the kitchen. He could crush her without a thought. Kill her without effort. He could take her to the ground before she could even utter a scream.

“You’ve…” her voice trails, going soft with genuine perplexion. “You’ve given me no reason to fear you. I was told many things that you would be and you have been absolutely none of them” 

A rumbling growl sparks in his lungs, soft, a warning, but he tamps it down with a grit of his teeth. Having already forgotten that she had been deserted at his castle gates with every intention of it being a death sentence. 

A moment passes and he scarcely remembers to breathe. 

“What is your name?” she asks. Again, and then he does look away. Out the window to where the sky is darkening with night and storm. 

She watches him, her heartbeat a steady, sure thing in the silence between them, and she nearly begins to move from where her hip is pressed to the table when he speaks. 

“Thor,” he says, and it feels like broken glass in his throat to say. He was called Thor, once. 

He looks to her when she says nothing, something aching acutely in his chest, and he finds her watching him with a curious look on her face. The side of her mouth lifts when he meets her eyes. 

“Thor,” she says, softly, and he breathes through what it feels like to hear her say it. Clenching his jaw beneath his beard and resisting the urge to turn and flee from the room. She raises her hand as if to reach for him, then seems to think better of it. Touching again at the waist of her dress. “Thank you, Thor.” 

He expects it to bring about a rush of unpleasant memories, hearing his name aloud for the first time in years. Expects it to take him back to the bitter grief and brittle pain of his past. 

But the gentle sweetness of her voice can carry no pain on it, it seems, and to hear it feels like something unfurling in his chest like a flower just burst from fresh spring ground, and he finds something inside of him aching, gently, to hear it from her once more. Again, and again, and again.

The temperature within the castle falls quickly as the sun sets, fading from a moderate chill to proper cold, and the sight of her breath fogging up before her face spurs Thor into action. He leaves her in her room to begin the process of preparing for bed and moves from room to room within the castle. Methodical as he searches, checking every corner of every room. Hoping to find firewood stashed somewhere. 

The great hall has two logs left, thin and brittle, and he scrounges a few more from assorted rooms, reaching into darkened fireplaces and searching for anything he can burn to keep her warm in the night. He winds up back at her door with less than he’d hoped for, and when he knocks, she comes to the door in a white linen shift, her hair plaited back for sleep. 

He builds the best fire he can with what he has, frowning as it takes a two tries for the flame to catch, and he finds himself looking over his shoulder at the single bed at the center of the room. The bedding atop it is plush and thick, and he hopes, as his stomach sours, that it will be enough to keep her warm. 

When he stands from the fire, now crackling in the hearth and throwing off soft waves of gentle heat, he finds her standing in the middle of the room. Her arm wrapped around her middle, watching him a little awkwardly. 

“Where do you sleep?” she asks, her voice small, and something inside of him aches. Wonders if she would trust anyone like this, if she trusts him so. Someone who would take advantage of the softness of her nature.

He inclines his head. “Down the hall,” he says, unable to stop the deep rumble to his voice, and she nods. 

He moves to the door after a long moment, pausing in the doorway to look back at her. Finding her unmoved and pale in the flickering light of the fire. He touches at the bronze key in the lock on her side of the door. Drawing her eye to it. Needing her to know that it’s there. That it works.

She nods again, and he forces himself to turn and go. 

The sleep that comes to Thor is light and fleeting, and he finds himself waking every hour. The light of the moon filtering through the boarded window in his room, casting long shadows across the floor, and breathing deeply. Watching his breath thicken and fog before his face as he stares up at the ceiling. Listening to the slow beat of his heart and unable to quiet his mind. Gritting his teeth against the urge that swells as the night passes to push himself to his feet and go check on her. Not wanting to frighten her by coming upon her in the night. Hoping she had the sense to lock the door to her room but doubting it somehow, and the knowledge of that sits strangely in his chest. 

He drifts in and out of restless sleep, overly heated beneath even the light pelts he keeps on the great expanse of his bed. Dreaming in faceless shapes and colors of the bitter cold and jeering shouts and the deep, dark expanse of the forest. 

Something rouses him, and he lurches awake. A growl rumbling from his chest, loud and instinctive, until the sleep clears from his eyes and he sees her there. Halfway through his room, stopped like she had been moving towards his bed. Her shift glowing faintly in the filtered moonlight, and he pushes himself to his feet at once. Moving to her quickly, too quickly, enough that the shape of him moving in the dark should frighten her, but she stays rooted in place, a little hitch in her breath the only thing he can hear over the thunder of his heart. 

Worry is an anvil pressing hard on his lungs and he can’t keep himself from curling down over her. Reaching for her and pressing his hand to her cheek, to see if she’s alright. If she’s hurt, if something has happened - 

Her cheek is like ice beneath his touch and that rips a snarl from him. Deep and angry as he presses his hand against her throat and feels her pulse there. Beating steady beneath the frozen smooth of her skin, and he feels her body wrack with a shiver, and he can’t stop himself from tipping her face up towards his. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, a faint tremor in her voice as her teeth chatter softly together. “The fire - I woke and it had gone out. I tried - I’m sorry, I thought I could - but I’m so _cold_ \- ” 

He growls again, instinct slicing hot though his body, sudden and deafening, and he bends low to scoop her into his arms. Easily, like she weighs nothing at all. Listening for a protest over the roar of his heart but hearing none, feeling her shiver and shove her face against his chest, and then he turns and goes. Gone blind with the drive to warm her. To care for her. Making it to his bed in three strides and tucking her to him as he gets under the cover of the pelts there and curls his body around hers. 

She clings to him, shivering against his chest and pressing her cold nose to the crease of his underarm as he palms gently at the back of her head and presses his face to her hairline. Rubbing his mouth over the cold skin there, drawing in deep lungfuls of her scent as he presses her to his chest and a rumble vibrates from his chest beyond his control. 

She whispers something against the skin of his chest, something that sounds like gratitude, and he quiets her with a soft mouth sound. Nudging his nose against her ear and behind it, needing to soothe her. Allowing himself to breathe when he feels her finally begin to warm in his arms, when her shivers subside to faint trembles that come and go and her hands loosen against his chest. 

He thinks to the cold dark of her room, the air frigid from the extinguished fire, and it makes something ugly tighten in his chest. The thought of her waking in shivers and trying to bundle herself in bedding to stick it out, frozen to the bone, not wanting to disturb him...or worse, the thought of her not waking at all, slipping away in the night to be found by him in the morning. Cold to the touch and gone. 

The next day will be spent in the forest, he knows, his jaw clenched on the lingering thought of it. Wrenching down dried boughs from every tree within a mile and breaking them into neat logs to be stacked along the wall in her room. She will sleep with a roaring fire every night, and the resolve of it hardens in his chest before softening a touch at the press of her nose to his skin as she settles down deeper. 

They lay together, entwined and radiating heat beneath warm pelts, breathing each other’s air, and Thor’s heart beats fiercely in his chest, even as his mind quiets as her scent blends with his on the bedding beneath them. Thor knows that he’s unable to let her go until she is warmed through, knows that he cannot, but he is surprised, after a long while, when he finds her breath going deep and slow with sleep. 

Something clenches tight in his chest and he presses his eyes closed, nudging his nose against her hair once more and drawing in a shaky breath as he feels her fall gently to sleep against him. Her fists curled loosely between her body and his with the soft, sweet puff of her breath over the fur on his chest. 

The moon continues to rise in the sky, casting filtered light across the room, but Thor does not see it. Sleep comes for him soon after, pulling him under easily as the weight and warmth of her in his arms grounds him. Soothes the brittle, aching parts in his chest and draws his breathing out deep and low. 

They lay together there, their heart beats slowing and syncing, as their bodies adjust to the feel of each other. Finding comfort there in the press of warmed skin and the soft exhale of breath as they both drift deeper and deeper into slumber. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note the new tags added for this chapter before reading.

After spending that night curled in the embrace of Thor, her nose tucked against the pelt hair of his chest as the wind howled outside and rattled the panes of the windows, she stays. 

They don’t speak of it particularly. There’s no conversation where she throws herself at his feet and begs for shelter from the brutal clutch of winter or where he begs her, silently, to remain there with him. He simply wakes from his deep slumber and finds that the bedding beside him is still warm and lush with her scent. He finds her in the kitchen then, her slippered feet soft on the stone floor, and when he enters the stone archway of the door, her head lifts and she smiles at the sight of him. 

And, well. That was that. 

It is a bit strange, having someone else within the castle walls. It takes getting used to, for Thor, who has spent the better part of a decade prowling the empty halls alone. He struggles with the need to watch over her. To follow her from room to room for some preposterous fear that she will somehow...harm herself, if allowed to wander the keep unattended. The castle is a dark and cold place, made up of hard stone floors and cold marble pillars. All sharp edges and fogging breaths, where she is warmth and light and Thor knows it irrational, but the thought of her wandering within the castle apart from him is unbearable. 

So, because he is a coward, he takes to the woods. He spends the first of her days in the castle out in the forest. Sprinting through the trees until his lungs ache with no purpose other than to think of something other than the scent of her that he can’t seem to free from his nose, relishing in the wet slush of snow beneath his bare feet and the harsh bark of tree trunks beneath his hands. 

There are proper tasks to undertake in the woods, thankfully, and he busies himself with them during daylight hours. He walks for miles through knee-deep show pulling down and breaking dried boughs into manageable pieces that he carries over his back in a rucksack. He brings every load of dry, brittle branches back to the castle and piles them in the foyer, uncaring as the snow on them melts slowly to the stone below as he turns back to go collect more firewood. 

He hunts when the opportunity arises on these treks, letting the parcel over his back slip quietly to the ground when he comes upon the scent of a wild hare and dropping silently to all fours as he lifts his nose on the crisp air. The prey he gathers gets left outside, piled against the stone wall near the servant door. Left to bleed out and freeze in the swirling wind until he brings the entire haul from the day inside when he returns for the night. 

Every night when he finally lets himself into the foyer and shakes the snow from his shoulders and hair, he is struck still for a moment by how different the castle feels. Even standing there in the dark in the foyer, the vaulted ceilings hushed and distant, he can feel the presence of her. Warming the cool air, something fresh from the smell of her lingering in the air. 

He knows not how she occupies herself at first, while he is away, until the fourth day when he trudges into the kitchen as the sun begins to set, weary from the great distance he traveled in the woods that day, and finds it...sparkling. 

She looks up when she hears him enter and smiles at him in the way that she does, while he stands in the doorway and stares. 

The kitchen is no small space, having been designed to provide meals for a great number of castle inhabitants, but as he stands there, he realizes that every single inch of it has been washed and scrubbed and rinsed. Every metal pot is hung in its proper place and gleaming in the roaring light from the fire in the hearth. The great table that runs down the length of the space has been tidied and dusted, utensils left forgotten for years put away, the wood of the table dark as if still damp from a wet rag. 

The sleeves of her dress are tied back somehow, a long strip of cloth secured behind her neck holding them back, and she lets out a happy sounding breath while his brain slowly, uselessly whirrs at the sight of the kitchen in a state he has not seen in as long as he can remember.

“I hope it’s alright,” she says, and his eyes train helplessly on the white of her teeth behind full lips as she rests her hands on her hips. “It took all day, but...I think it looks good, don’t you?” 

It takes a moment for words to come to him. “You did this?” he asks, frozen hare hanging limply in his fists at his side. 

She tilts her head to the side, a wry smile touching at her mouth. “Who else?” she asks and then laughs softly when his gaze abruptly leaves her. Sensing the tease in her tone and feeling something strange flip in his chest. 

She comes around the table to him and takes the hare from his hands. He watches her incredulously, still unaccustomed to her apparent utter lack of discomfort in his presence after just a few short days, his eyes falling to her hands when they gently curl around his fingers and one by one loosen his hold on the prey gripped there. 

She brings the hare back around the table and fusses around for a moment looking for a knife. Finding it in a drawer that pulls out from under the table, where she must have placed it during her deep clean. 

He still hasn’t moved when she makes the first incision across the belly of the first hare. She looks up to him then, and he sees the first touches of concern around the corners of her eyes. 

“I hope it’s alright,” she says, a little quieter. “I didn’t ask. I just thought…” 

He shakes his head, a gruff sound coming from his chest. He steps inside the kitchen finally, stepping first towards the table and then deciding against it. Stepping to the side until he’s in the corner by the far window, looking down at the courtyard because it’s easier than looking at her. 

“You are not a maid,” is all he can think to say. “You need not earn your keep here.” 

A smile lights across her face and he feels something unspool in his chest he hadn’t realized had wound tight. “I quite enjoy it, actually. It’s peaceful to have something to do with your hands that doesn’t require thought, you know?” 

He does, so he nods. That’s how he feels when sprinting through the trees. 

She pulls the innards of the hare out onto the table, cutting them away with a quick flick of her knife, and the smell of warming blood on the air makes his stomach rumble. 

“You need not do more than this,” he says, trying again. Looking at her across the room and finding her cheeks flushed from the heat of the fire behind her in the hearth. He lifts his nose on the air subtly, unable to help himself, and sucks in a quiet taste of her scent. Feeling it warm all the way down to his toes and his mouth flush with saliva at the flavor of it. 

She bobs her head from side to side for a moment, as if she’s thinking. When she looks up at him again, she’s squinting at him a little, her hands paused in the chest cavity of the hare. “Will you be angry with me if I do more than this?” she asks. 

Her hands withdraw and he sees that her fingers are coated with thick blood. He wants to lick them clean. He looks away. 

“No,” he huffs, at last, and that answer seems to please her greatly as she continues to dress the creature below her on the table. 

“Good,” she says. Smiling when she looks up at him again from the stiripped carcas of the hare, satisfied with her work. 

His mind wanders as he watches her start on the next hare. Drawing it across the table to sit in front of her, making a careful incision with her knife. Wondering, not for the first time, what life she must have led prior to coming to him for her to... _be_ like this. Open and trusting and warm to him, wanting to...care for him, or at least repay him for whatever debt she believes he is owed. 

She catches him staring and makes a curious sound, her brows lifted, and he lets out a breath. Looking away from her before voicing his thoughts. 

“You’re too trusting,” he says. Feeling like it’s a larger confession than it really is, hoping it doesn’t come across as an accusation but needing to say it all the same. 

She makes a soft, skeptical sound as she strips the skin from the hare. “I don’t think I am,” she says. 

Thor nearly laughs at that, his voice coming out in a huff. “That you are here right now is evidence that you are.” 

She shoots him a look that reads a little unimpressed as she slices the rabbit’s feet from the carcass and pushes them aside. “You think I’m foolish. That’s what you mean to say.” 

A little heat flares in Thor’s chest because she’s...not wrong. “You are living in the home of a...a monster,” he says, the words coming out thicker than he means them to. “Sleeping under its roof. Preparing...meals for it.” 

She points her knife at him, the blade bloodied. “I know monsters, Thor, and you are not one. I won’t hear of that anymore.” 

He settles into an uncomfortable silence then. Unsure of how to respond to that. 

She places both hares over the fire and comes back up, wiping her stained hands on a damp cloth, and regarding him like he’s very interesting to her. Like she can’t quite figure him out. 

“Has it occured to you that perhaps I’m simply an excellent judge of character?” she says. She gathers the waste from the hares on the table top into a pile to discard later. 

He wants to correct her. To point out that she apparently is not, since she’s remaining here with him by choice, but he chews on his lip instead. 

She sighs and not unkindly. Her brow a little twisted as she looks across the table at him. “I have experienced kindness in my life, Thor. Kindness and unkindness in equal measure. You have shown me nothing but kindness. That is enough for me.” 

He watches as she moves to the basin at the side of the room to rinse her hands beneath the water pump there. 

“You have permitted me to stay here, which, again, is a kindness.” The look she shoots him when his mouth opens leaves little room for argument. “And one I do not accept lightly. I will repay you however I can for that kindness, whether it means dusting your shelves or preparing food for us to eat. Will you allow me to do that?” 

Thor resists the urge to cross his arms over his chest. Feeling a little chastised but not unduly so. Pleased, strangely, to see this side of her. To know she is not a wilting flower, trapped here with him by monstrous strength of his presence. 

“Yes,” he says, finally, and then that smile breaks over her face again. All of the seriousness from before melting away like she’s relieved for it. 

“Thank you,” she says, inclining her head towards him. “Another kindness.” 

The thought of it wrestles within Thor as they eat across the table from each other. He watches as she eats her fill, groaning softly at the flavor as her teeth tears the roasted flesh. He doesn’t have the courage to tell her that his keeping her here is not a selfless act. Not at all. That every day he wakes and feels the warmth of her presence within the castle walls is a day he feels an ounce lighter. Feels a touch freer. He doesn’t have the strength to tell her that him keeping her here is not a kindness but a selfish endeavor. One where he is gaining much more than he is giving. 

He voices none of this and allows himself simply to be there with her. Eating measured bites of the food spread between them once he’s sure she’s had enough. Listening to the happy hums that fall from her lips as she swallows down the last she can, watching her wipe the warm grease from her mouth before casting him another smile. Warm, always. Warmer than the fire that roars in the hearth, and Thor doesn’t know if he’ll ever quite get used to it. 

But, he determines, he is very much willing to try. 

After the night when her fire went out, Thor is sure that her room is well-appointed. He fills the hidden chamber in the wall alongside the fireplace until it’s so full with wood that the door barely shuts. He does his best to dust the bedding by patting it with his hands, and checks and re-checks that the wardrobe is full to bursting with clothing for her to wear. 

He checks her before bedding down every night, growing accustomed to the sweet ache he feels in his chest when she wishes him goodnight. 

He has gathered from his conversations with her that she came from very little in the village, and he hopes that what he’s able to offer her will suffice. That she will be comfortable in the castle, in her room, and that she’ll make it her own. That it will become a place of warmth and comfort and security for her. 

It’s not a week after that first night when he wakes slowly, in the middle of the night. His chest rumbling on something pleasant and warm. Shifting his body to settle more into the mattress, his nose nudging against something soft - 

And then he nearly leaps from the bed when he realizes that his entire body is curled around hers. 

His heart surges to his throat, his eyes flying open. He goes rigidly, painfully still, blinking quickly to adjust his eyes to the faint light in the room, but he knows by smell that she’s there. Knows by the taste of her that’s sitting heavy on the back of his tongue that she’s lying beside him. Her face tucked into the hair of his chest, her hands resting beside her cheek in loosely curled fists. 

He lays there, his chest heaving, as his mind trips uselessly over itself. Trying to make sense of what he’s seeing. Why she’s _there_ \- 

He has a panicked moment to wonder if he’s _brought her there_. If he’s gone to her in his sleep and carried her to his bed like some sort of possessive, feral creature. Unable to control himself around her, unable to keep himself _away_ \- 

He hears a soft intake of breath and then his entire body goes numb as he realizes that she’s awoken. No doubt brought about by the sudden heaving in his chest, the hot puffs of his panicked breath fogging up the room. 

She cannot see him from where she’s tucked against him, though he can look down past his chin to see her. His heart hammers in his chest as he waits. Waits for her to realize where she is. What he’s done. To leap up screaming from his bed, to race out into the winter night to flee his touch. 

What he sees, though, in the faint light from the moon, is her eyes falling closed once more. What he feels is her hands nudging forward against the heat radiating off his chest. What he hears is another soft exhale as she settles in deeper. Closer to him. Willing, apparently. 

Her fire must have gone out. She must have needed to come to him again. 

He stares down at her. Stupefied, as sleep slowly washes over her again and her body goes warm and loose with it. 

He stays like that for what feels like an eternity. Every muscle in his body locked up tight, holding himself back from where she’s curled up against his chest like a kitten, as his mind circles around the impossibility of what he saw. What it means. 

She came to him. She slipped into his bed and curled up beside him. Woke to her face pressed against him and then drifted under once more. 

When his exhaustion finally overcomes his propriety, he lets himself ease slightly. Lets his body sink deeper into the bed, even as it tips her gently against him. Lets himself breathe out a long, controlled exhale as his whole body flushes with the heat of her against him. 

He keeps his arms at his sides. His eyelids growing heavy against his will, knowing that if he drifts off, he will be unable to stop himself from gathering her close. 

Sleep takes him, sometime in the night, and he wakes in the morning to his face pressed against the warm skin of her throat. 

He extricates himself from his bed at once, his cock thick and aching shamefully between his legs, and when he goes to her room to check her fire, he finds the embers still glowing strong. Her room is blissfully warm still, as the morning light shines through the windows and casts bright across the floor, and he turns and looks at the door he came through. Bewildered, as steadfastly ignores the weight of his cock and the ache of his knot, and the knowledge of what her skin feels like pressed against his lips. 

As the days pass and lengthen, the sun taking longer to cross the sky with each passing day, he realizes that she has no intention of heeding his admonition about taking care of the castle. Every time Thor returns to the castle after spending the day out in the woods, he finds another part of the castle has been touched by her. The property is expansive and she is but one person, so progress is not particularly quick, but it’s still altogether impossible to miss. 

The stone floors are swept and washed for the first time in a decade, years of grubby footprints set in heavy dust like fossils in volcanic mud scrubbed away on hands and knees with a heavy bristle brush. Cobwebs are dusted from sconces with care, and he catches her on more than one occasion balanced precariously on stacks of wooden crates, his heart seizing in his chest at the sight of her delicate ankle wobbling as she reaches up and up for a stubborn tendril stuck to the wall above her head. 

He comes home one afternoon to find her hanging from a board that’s been nailed across a window in one of the easterly corridors, wriggling around and trying to use her weight to pull it free as her feet dangle uselessly several feet above the ground, and he ends up frightening her when his body carries him forward at once. Rushing ahead on a rough sound from somewhere deep in his chest and snatching her from where she hangs. Setting her down on the ground when she yelps and lurches in his arms, startled and a little indignant, his chest rising and falling quickly as he takes a step back and mutters an apology, his entire body flushing hot. 

It’s an excuse to stop retreating to the woods with the rise of the sun every morning and he takes it. Committing himself instead to working at her side as she slowly brings the castle back to life, one small project at a time. 

A small part of him worries, at first. Spending time with someone for the first time in so many years, and someone he does not know. He spends the first of their days spent together standing back. Awkwardly skirting around the edges of her space, waiting, always, for her face to turn to him with disgust or derision or to hear her heartbeat spike in fear when he comes near. 

He learns very quickly, however, that not only does she appear to be wholly unconcerned with the physical form he takes, but that she likes to talk. Quite a lot. He also learns that the somewhat short or unhelpful responses he manages to muster to her many questions do not deter her, and Thor thinks that’s just as well indeed. 

They’re in the gallery hall one afternoon, a dusty, forlorn place Thor hasn’t visited in as long as he can remember, and he has her perched up on his shoulder so she can reach at the boards criss-crossing the great arched windows when she asks him a question that makes his heart stutter. 

“Have you always had this form?” she asks, and though he can’t see her face through the plush volume of the skirt of her dress, he can hear the distance in her voice that means she’s focusing quite hard on something. The board, quite likely, and he hears the tell-tale creak of old nails in wood as she wobbles it with an investigating hand. The question is spoken like any of the other hundreds she’s asked of him, no particular weight or value to it, though the words make his mind sputter to a halting stop. 

He shifts her on his shoulder, getting the flat of his palm better underneath her as she squirms to sit farther up. Getting her hands around the edge of the board and tugging, to no avail. 

For a moment, absurdly, he has to think on it. To search back through his mind to see if memories of anything but clawed paws and horned skull exist, buried deep somewhere. So utterly resigned to the creature that he’s become that it takes a moment of concerted effort to recall that he was not born a beast. 

“No,” he says at last. Focusing his eyes on the faded wallpaper on the wall a few inches from his face. 

He hears her perk up. Feels the pause before she begins tugging on the board again. He clenches his jaw and waits for the deluge of questions, but she focuses instead on the task at hand. Deliberately, he senses. 

It’s a minute before the board finally breaks free and she lifts it with some effort over Thor’s head and lets it clatter loudly to the ground. Dust plumes up around them, thick and swirling in the new shaft of sunlight that pours into the hall, and he feels her grip at him to steady herself as she waves her hand in front of her face and coughs softly. 

She’s working on the last board when she speaks again, her voice gone a little softer. “Can you change back?” 

The board creaks beneath her hands and more dust shakes loose in the soft shaft of light casting across them. 

He wonders in that moment what she is thinking. The foolish part of him wondering if she wishes he could. If she’s played out that scenario in her mind as he has - how different the situation would be if instead of coming upon a barren castle haunted by a wretched beast she had come upon a castle inhabited by a man instead. One who could care for her and tend to her. One with handsome, human features and a mouth that was soft and warm that he could press against hers. 

He knows the answer to her question. He’d spent his first years as a beast searching desperately for answers. Tearing through the great library in the heart of the keep, reading tome after tome on sorcery and magic and transfiguration but coming, always, to one solitary answer. One he had accepted long ago. 

“No,” he rumbles lowly, his nose twitching from the tickle of falling dust. “I cannot.” 

If she is disappointed by the news, she has the kindness not to show it. There is no sorrow or regret in her voice, only a cautious interest when she asks after a pause, “Would you, if you could?” 

She’s looking down at him, he can feel it. He keeps his gaze forward, his eyes tracing the muted pattern there concealed by dust and the wear of the time. 

“Who would remain this way by choice?” he asks, his tongue feeling a little thick, and she makes a contemplative sound over his head. 

“I don’t know,” she says, tensing atop his shoulder as she throws her entire weight against the board. “There must be some advantages.” 

His lips tug on his tusks in a frown. “Advantages,” he repeats. 

A groan and a pop echo through the hall and then the last board comes free, nearly tipping her backwards off his shoulders with the force of it. He juggles her for a second, jerking his head back to avoid the heavy plank of wood and embedded nails as she fumbles with it, before it clatters heavily to the ground. 

She gives him an apologetic pat on the arm when he lowers her back to the ground, and once down, she props her hands on her hips, looking up at the arch at the window. Unobscured, finally, light from the afternoon sun streaming in across her face. 

“Sure,” she says, a little out of breath as she squints into the sun through the frosted pane. “You’re strong!” 

“I was strong before,” he mutters, unable to help himself. 

She tosses him a look. “You carry me with no effort.” 

“You weigh nothing - ” 

She bends low to gather the boards she’d pried loose and he takes them in hand before she can take them. On principle and also because they’re covered in jagged nails that she seems determined to pay no heed to. 

She follows him when he brings them to the pile near the entryway, stacked nearly up to his waist with boards they’d pulled down that afternoon. 

“You catch prey with your bare hands, so you must be quite fast.” 

He huffs softly and ignores her, stacking the new boards atop the old ones. 

“And you hunt for them, right? How do you even - ” 

Her voice trails when he stands to full height and gives her a look. His skin feels too small for his frame, having this conversation. Too tight, a little itchy. There is no part of him worth this level of interest, past some sort of morbid curiosity. 

Her eyes narrow at him, her intrigue plain to see and utterly sincere, and he’s never wished more for her to have _some_ small amount of fear of him. 

“Can you hear things?” 

He stares and she shakes her head, cutting off his rebuttal before he can even verbalize it. 

“Can you hear...more? Can you hear a hare in the snow?” 

He lets out a breath when it seems she is not ready to let this train of thought go. “My hearing is...accelerated, somewhat. Yes.” 

And because she’ll never stop surprising him, her face lights _up_. “Oh,” she says, touching her hand to the base of her throat. Her brows lifting in surprise. “That’s incredible.” 

“It’s not,” he says, but she won’t be dissuaded. 

“Your nose - I see you smelling the air sometimes.” 

Thor’s entire body flushes hot, mortified as he busies himself stacking planks of wood. He’s usually smelling her when he does that. 

“Is that - can you smell more, too?” 

He grumbles, his lip lifting around his tusks, but she pays him no mind. 

“That’s amazing, Thor,” she tells him, and he ignores her steadfastly. Standing back to full height and turning to go from the room as she trails behind him. 

“Do I have a smell?” she asks, and he groans, which draws a laugh from her. Joyful and bright. 

He moves past her and down the hall, unable to stop himself from calling the memory of her scent to his mind. The warm, green floral of it, the richness of it on the air and on his taste buds. 

“Do I stink?” she calls to him as he leaves her deliberately behind, delighted. “You can tell me if I stink!” 

It takes her time to grow accustomed to the grandeur of the castle and Thor spends no small amount of his time simply following her from room to room as she explores it. She enjoys his company, if the conversation she maintains with him as they move slowly from room to room is any indication, and Thor is grateful for the excuse to be near her. 

She asks him questions as they explore, spending more time in every room than Thor thinks is warranted, but he’s content to follow along. She examines everything she can get her hands on, often mystified by the extravagance of his previous life, and sometimes pushed off-kilter by it. Asking him the different functions of the different rooms. Calling memories back to Thor’s mind that he’d thought he’d lost to time and distance, telling her stories of the banquets and balls the castle used to host, because she seems to enjoy those stories the most. 

He’s indulging her in such a story when they make their way through the castle to the south wing, walking through bright shafts of light that stream through the windows of the hall. She’d asked what they would eat, back then, and he wracks his mind to recall. Listing foods as they come to him - roast pheasant and plum pudding and sweet breads and cured bacon - explaining further what each of the foods tasted like when she prods him further. 

He’s gathered bits and pieces about her life, before. Not that she’s told him much, just small parts he’s able to piece together as he lies in bed at night. Little comments or asides she would slip into conversation, perhaps not realizing she had. For someone who finds apparent joy in simple conversation, she speaks of herself very little. Always asking of Thor, always encouraging him with a grin and a laugh to expand on his answer when it’s short and single-syllabled. 

The wealth of the castle stuns her utterly and though he knows it’s opulence, even in its disrepair, would perhaps overwhelm most, he feels it goes further with her. It is difficult for him to sort out whether her gratitude for the simplest of things is because of her nature or because her former life left her so wanting, and he finds often that he believes it to be both. 

Still, he is grateful, to be able to provide her this. Even if _this_ is the company of a wild creature and the empty, echoing halls of a castle well past its prime. So he indulges her when she asks of his past, because it’s something else he can do for her. Something small, even as his throat aches at the end of the day from the effort of speaking. 

He’s so lost in trying to recall the precise flavor of fresh butter that he doesn’t realize which set of oak doors she’s pushing into until he sees what lies behind. 

His voice trails off. His heart thuds heavy in his chest as she moves into the room at once. Approaching the large pile of items there in the middle of the room with what seems a mix of anticipation and trepidation.

She comes to stand beside it, staring down at it for a long moment before stooping low to pick up a chalice with missing stones around the rim and examining it in the light. She casts a look over her shoulder to Thor, her brow drawn in soft confusion, and then she reaches again and replaces the item in her hands. Picking up a small metal chest, testing the hinge of the lid and hearing it squeak softly. 

She puts that down too, after a moment, and then wraps her arms around her waist. Turning to him and asking, “Thor, what is this?” 

He steps through the threshold of the room, then. Finally. Summoned by the lost tilt to her voice until he’s standing beside her, staring down at the same pile of garbage. 

And it is garbage. 

He lets out a breath, his shoulders deflating a little. “They’re the, uh...offerings,” he says.

Something changes in her scent. Just a tinge of something on the air and he can’t quite catch it before it fades. 

“These are from my village?” she asks, her eyes still trained on the mound of piled metal and scrap that reaches nearly to her eye level. 

He nods, after a moment. Casting a look down at her, unsure how to read her in the moment. Unable to interpret the sudden downturn of her mood. 

She picks up another item, some sort of metal cross, and picks at the gold paint flecking from it in the afternoon light. “They told us they gave you treasure,” she mutters. “To appease you.To keep you from killing our livestock and stealing away our children. They took...money, from all of us, to pay for the protection afforded by their offerings.” 

Thor’s belly sours. He keeps his gaze forward, feeling a little ill. 

“This is worthless. All of it. Isn’t it?” 

Thor casts her another weary look and feels something ache in his chest at the expression laid bare on her face. “Yes,” he says, his voice a hollow husk. 

Her hands curl tighter around her waist. “You never...you never actually came to us, did you? You never…” 

He doesn’t bother answering as she turns memories over in her mind. Thor knew that the village hated him and assumed they told stories about him, but he’d never had opportunity to know the details. Nor the desire, in truth. 

The laugh that huffs from her lips is bitter. “They lied about everything,” she mutters, and Thor doesn’t know if she’s speaking to herself or to him. “It’s no wonder they were wrong about you, too. About what you’d do to me.” 

Memory floods Thor, a rip current that makes his mind whirl as words from before echo through his mind. Spoken by her in barely a whisper, on the first day that he knew her.

_“They told me you would kill me on sight.”_

Thor’s fists spasm at his sides, and he lets out a halting breath. “They left you at my gates to die,” he says. Remembering, all at once, having apparently banished that conclusion that he’d already reached from his mind until this very moment. Unable to even consider the implications of what it meant. 

She shrugs. Her eyes still trained on the cross in her hand as she turns it over. “I don’t know if that’s what they intended, but it’s what they told me.” 

Rage is an ugly thing, simmering inside Thor. He hates the taste of it on his tongue and he forces himself to take a half-step back from her. Feeling his jaw set tight, his teeth gritting in a swell of emotion that he needs desperately to keep contained. 

“Why?” he asks. Forcing the question through his clamped jaws. 

His mind is whirling. Getting ahead of himself, imagining - thinking of what could have possibly happened - what could have earned her a _death sentence_ \- 

She laughs again. Softly. Sounding sad. She lifts her shoulder in a shrug. “Turned down the wrong man.” 

Thor’s heart thuds in his chest like a war drum. His blood roars in his ears. Deafening. 

He remembers to breathe after one long moment and sucks in a ragged breath, too loud in the quiet of the room, and it draws her eye. Makes her look up at him over her shoulder, to where his chest is rising and falling in the sudden surge of his rage. 

He sees him at once in his mind’s eye. The leading rider. The man who had shouted cruelly for him to come down and collect his prize. 

Thor swallows thickly. Beginning to see spots around the corners of his vision. “Did...was he one of the riders...that dropped you at my gate. This man.” 

She huffs again and nods, and he knows. He _knows_. 

He whirls in place, turning on his foot so fast that the pelt around his shoulders billows. Unable to stop the growl that rips its way from his lungs, deep and gravel, and he makes it four steps before hands clutch around his. Dragging him to a stop just past the doorway of the room. 

He looks back, his chest heaving. Blinking back the red fury in his vision to see her standing there, both of her hands clasped around the bulk of his hand. Her heart is _kicking_ in her chest, when he listens for it over the roar of his own blood in his ears. 

He starts to leave again, tugging on his hand to free it, but it draws an anguished sound from her, and it stops him in his tracks. 

“Where are you going?” she asks, frantic, sudden emotion wobbling in her voice. 

He doesn’t wrench his hand from hers, though it’s a near thing. “To kill him,” he growls, stepping away from her. 

He ends up dragging her, her slippered feet skidding across the stone floor as she clings to his hand, and it’s not until her foot catches on a lip in the stone and she stumbles that it shakes him free. Clears a little of the white hot fury that’s utterly blinding him. 

“Please,” she says, and he knows before he turns to her that there are tears prickling at her eyes. “Please don’t.” 

He forces himself to face her and the glisten of her eyes makes his chest ache like a fresh wound. Her fingers grip around his palm. Desperate.

“Please don’t go,” she says, her eyes red-rimmed and brimming, and the fight drains from him in an instant. Just like that, seeing the naked fear playing out there in her eyes. Feeling the hard grip of her trembling fingers around his hand. 

He scrubs his free hand over his face and then tugs his hand free from hers. Gently, but needing some space between them as he attempts to wrangle the emotions warring in his chest. 

The hall is empty and echoing around them. The sun casting cheerful beams all around them as they face off in breathless silence. 

“I won’t,” he grunts at last, and she nods, gratitude flashing across her face that he feels he did not earn nor deserve. “I won’t...go to the village. But I need to hunt.” 

He can’t miss how her face crumples. Anxiety spiking in her scent, bitter and sickly, and he shakes his head at her. Needing her to understand. 

“I won’t,” he tells her again. Catching her gaze and holding it. Showing her as best he can that he means what he is saying. “I won’t go to the village.” 

“Stay,” she murmurs, and he watches a tear hover at the corner of her eye. He clenches his fists to keep from reaching for it. “Please.” 

“I need…” He shakes his head. “We need food. For tonight.” 

She shakes her head and the tear falls. Skimming down her cheek and his aches at the sight of it. “We have enough,” she insists, and he knows that she’s right. He’s hunted and stored enough prey to feed them through the rest of the week. 

He can’t tell her that every instinct in his body is propelling him forward, raging, snarling, urging him out into the cold and down the hill towards the village. He could find him. He could find him so _easily_. He can’t tell her why he needs to take to the woods instead. To run among the trees until he can’t breathe and can’t see and can’t feel anything else. Why he can’t stay here with her while his ugly rage simmers and burns in his veins. 

He can’t tell her, so he doesn’t. He simply turns from her and goes. Making his way through the castle blindly, in habit and instinct, not having a single coherent thought until he shoulders his way through the servant door in the foyer and his feet slide in the cold slush outside. 

He spares only a second to ensure the door is shut securely behind him before he lunges forward on a snarl. Sucking in great lungfuls of frigid air and sprinting to the woods. Where only the birds and the trees will hear the force of his fury. Where the snow beneath his feet and the whistle of the cold wind through the branches will ground him in his animal form and keep him from doing something far more wild. Something he would not regret, but something he vowed he would not do. 

She must have snooped through some additional wardrobes in her time exploring the castle, because she greets him the next morning clothed heavily in furs. The conversation of the day before was settled over a solemn dinner the night prior, once she’d looked him over and seen no sign that he’d broken his assurance to her, and she seems to have moved past it as she grins at the sight of his step faltering at the sight of her all bundled up. 

His heart beats behind his ribs, his brow drawing. “Are you leaving?” he asks, his belly souring at even the thought. 

Her expression pinches, like he’s being absurd. “I’m going outside,” she corrects. “Would you like to join me?” 

Thor is dumbstruck, standing there. Looking down at her and where her cheeks have gone rosy from the extra warmth of the jacket and tall boots and scarf that’s wrapped thickly around her throat. “What do you need outside?” he asks slowly. Not understanding. 

She shrugs, grinning lopsidedly in that easy way of hers. “I just haven’t been in some time,” she tells him. “Not since, uh…” her voice trails. “Not since the first night, and I find myself...avoiding it. Which is silly. I won’t be afraid of snow.” 

She’s right, of course. She hasn’t set foot outside the castle since Thor cast her out into a storm on the first day. She’d never showed any interest in doing so, and thinking back on it, on the cold, pale, lifeless image of her form at the base of a tree, he understands why. 

Still, she appears determined, and he’s never been able to deny her much of anything. 

He acqueices with a bit of a performative sigh and she bounces up on the balls of her feet, her gloved hands clapping softly together. 

She doesn’t bother to ask if he needs to bundle up, having seen him disappear into the snow in nothing but the tatters of his breeches and the pelt draped over his shoulder dozens of times now, and they move in quiet tandem to the foyer and the little wooden door there. 

The weather is pleasant enough outside, and Thor is grateful that she at last decided to catch her wild hair about conquering her fear of the outdoors on a day that wasn’t a blizzarding, frigid mess. The sun is bright overhead as they step out into the courtyard and the breeze is minimal as Thor stands there a little awkwardly, and watches her. Not sure what she means to do out here, in the featureless courtyard that’s covered in feet of wet, oppressive snow. 

But she simply sets off, picking a direction and going in it. Tramping through the snow in her boots and holding a hand to her face to block the bright reflection of the sun off of the snow. 

The courtyard is massive. An oversized space for the oversized castle it contains, fenced around the border with tall, sharp, wrought iron spikes that do nothing to keep the huge drifts of snow out as the wind pushes them across the earth. Though buried beneath feet of snow, Thor has some idea of the layout from memory. 

In the space in front of the courtyard are tall, raised gardens surrounded on all sides by stacked stone. They hold flowers in the summer, or did, back when anyone in the castle had any interest in maintaining them. There are fountains too, intricate works of carved stone that used to fill and spray with water, though Thor can’t remember when they last did. 

The space behind the castle is less grandiose, though it looks all the same now, underneath the thick blanket of white. As Thor steps slowly after her as she makes her way through the deep drifts, he tries to recall what the space behind the castle contains. He remembers beds for growing vegetables, lower to the ground but framed by wooden planks, stretched down the length of the courtyard. He used to wander through them as a boy and pick fresh berries, he remembers. 

He learns where one such garden bed is located when the toe of her boot catches on one beneath the snow and she pitches abruptly forward on a sudden, surprised little wail. She goes face-first into the snow drift below, not able to bring her arms up to catch herself before gravity brings her entire body down, and he can’t help the instinctive flip of his heart as he steps quickly to her and turns her with a hand on her shoulder. 

Her face is wet with snow and bright with laughter as he turns her over onto her back, the tip of her nose and cheeks flushed bright from the chill. She makes no move to stand, settling back against the snow drift and staring up at Thor where he stands over her. Letting her gloved hands drift over top the snow a little, pushing it around. 

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asks, her mouth curved in a smile as her laughter dies out. 

He schools his expression at once. “Like what?”

“I’m fine,” she teases him, balling up a handful of snow and lobbing it at him. It falls short of him a solid foot, plopping heavily into the snow bank, and her head tips back on another laugh. “Sometimes I swear you think I’ll hurt myself just by existing.” 

Thor flicks his eyes away from her on a huff, a little embarrassed. He kicks some snow at where she’s laying with a bare foot. “Says the one laying in a bank of snow right now.” 

She _hmms_ in apparent agreement, her head tilting a little to the side as she looks up at him. “It’s not so bad, I guess,” she says. About the snow. “When you’re all bundled up and you know that there’s warm tea just inside.” 

It surprises Thor that it takes him a moment to adjust to seeing her like this. She is fine, of course. She’s thickly bundled in furs and layers and probably can’t even feel the cold of the snow around her, but the sight of her laid out in it brings him back, unbidden. Flashes images through his mind of when he found her, bare-footed and pale and near death out in the dark. 

He looks away after a moment, swallowing past what feels like a stone lodged in his throat. 

“It’s beautiful,” she says, and her voice brings him back. He looks to her and realizes she speaks of the castle, towering and tall before them there in the courtyard. 

She tilts her head more against the snowbank, letting her eyes drift over it’s form. “I’ve never seen it from this side,” she says. “It looks so lonely from down here.” 

A soft huff falls from his lips. “It’s not lonely from the inside?” he asks, letting his eyes drift across the bright reflection of the sun on the snow, for lack of anything else to look at besides her curled up in a snow drift. 

She’s quiet, though, and that draws his eye to her again. She’s looking up at him with a curious expression that he can’t quite decipher.

“No,” she says, a little slowly. Like she doesn’t understand what he means. “I have you.” 

Something flares in Thor’s chest and it forces his eyes away quickly. Back to scanning the courtyard, feeling the back of his neck heat with something he doesn’t care to closely examine. 

The feeling lingers, warm and fluttering like a living thing, long after he pulls her up to her feet over her objection and dusts the snow from her back and rear. It remains, planted somewhere deep in his chest, as he follows her as she tramps through the rest of the courtyard, pointing to things and asking Thor about them. 

And he tries his best to recall the types of flowers that once grew there and assures her they can plant root vegetables in the spring if she can find any seedlings, but all the while, his entire body warms and thrums on that feeling. The sun moves slowly across the afternoon sky and his entire body feels alight with it, managing to return her smile when she looks over her shoulder at him and her entire face creases with one. 

The days begin to lengthen as winter passes over the castle, sunset drawing later and later in the day with each rise and fall of it. Life there settles into an easier rhythm, growing accustomed to the other as they spend their days tending to the castle and their nights sharing meals beside a roaring fire. Her presence stops feeling _other_ to Thor and her absence takes that place in his senses - if there is ever a time where he cannot sense her within the castle walls, if she has wandered to the far end of the keep, he feels the loss of her like a physical thing. 

The castle comes back to life slowly, through most of her work and some of his. Boards are torn down from windows and light from the sun carves bright beams through the heavy velvet curtains and across the flooring and the dusty paintings along the walls. The air within the castle warms every day, on the fires tends to in various hearths during the day and on the presence of her. 

She works from sun up to sun down most days, flitting through the castle with an energy he can barely bring himself to match, and the effort of her work has her weary by the end of the day. Spending most evenings stretched across a settee in the great hall beside a roaring fire, sighing quietly beneath the warm wrap of a pelt spread over her chest, as Thor sits beside her in an overstuffed chair, and learns to simply _be_. 

The night time ritual between the two of them continues to be a strange and delicate dance. Every night he goes to her room to stoke the fire in her hearth and to be sure the woodpile beside it is stacked high. He wishes her goodnight and she responds in kind, both pretending as their eyes meet in the space of the closing door, that she will not join him later. That she will not slip into his room once night has truly fallen and come find him in his bed. 

He wakes most nights to find her there, curled up against him in the dark, and on nights he sleeps through, he wakes in the morning to find his bedding smelling richly of her in a way that he cannot ignore the implication of. 

She does not speak of it, so he does not. His shame over his reaction to her in his bed wanes over time, as she comes to him again and again, by her own choice. Even after no doubt waking to the press of his face against the crown of her head and the hard throb of his cock between his legs before slipping from his bed and going to the kitchen to start up breakfast. 

It simply becomes something that happens, her joining him in the night, and he grows accustomed to the feeling of her body pressed to his as the winter winds gust outside the keep. 

It is one such night when he comes slowly around to consciousness in such a gentle way that for a moment he can’t tell what roused him. The fire in his hearth crackles, flames dancing across the dried wood stacked there, and he wonders if some noise outside alerted some distant part of his animal mind to wake him. There is a smell on the air he can’t quite identify, faint, but intriguing. 

Then he hears her, where she’s tucked up close against him in the bed. Laying on her back with her shoulder and arm stuck beneath the weight of his body.

It’s quiet at first, a soft inhale then a sigh of an exhale. Breathed out warmly into the cool air, past a quiet hitch in her lungs, and he frowns. Shifting to look down at her there in the dark, touching at the warm skin of her cheek with the back of his knuckle, wondering if she’s dreaming. 

She shifts in sleep, her shins touching together beneath the pelt draped over the both of them, and it draws the pelt down a little, casting soft moonlight over her form.

His eyes fall slowly, then jerk back up, his lungs clenching tight when he sees that her nipples have hardened beneath her slip. Pebbling up in the cool night air, straining against the soft material, making his mouth flush with saliva at the sight of them. 

She huffs out another soft exhale, her eyes pinching tighter closed as her lips part, and he watches, hopelessly hypnotized, as her lungs contract and expand. As her chest rises and falls, her slip catching on the stiffened peaks of her nipples. 

His nose catches on a scent again, thickening in the air between them, and his head turns to find it. His heart racing in his chest as he tastes it on his tongue and it rings faintly familiar, like crushed petals and light twist of musk. His mind turns on it, scouring his memory for the source, knowing the scent to be a familiar one, though he can’t pinpoint…

Another breath catches in her throat, breaking loose on a soft cadence that sounds like a quiet moan, and Thor feels his blood go hot. He watches as her head tips back against the bedding, the long line of her throat catching the flickering light from the fire in the hearth, and he feels his cock ache between his legs. Hot and scorching, his knot pulsing steadily at the base of it, as he realizes what’s happening. What she must be dreaming of. 

Her hands ball gently into the bedding beneath her and her thighs rub together beneath her slip, another breathless sound slipping from her lips, and it strikes Thor with the force of an avalanche that the scent that’s making his mouth flush wet with saliva is the scent of arousal. That the tantalizing smell that’s making his cock go hard and his hips want to rut against her is coming from the space between her legs. From where she’s gone dewy and wet from whatever dream is occupying her sleeping mind. 

Her thighs rub together again, the shift slipping up, and Thor sees the firelight catch on something. Something slick and smeared across the delicate skin there, and the scent of it grips him. Makes his entire body lurch with a roil of heat, and then he’s pushing himself back from her. Not able to even be delicate about it as he all but falls from the bed and retreats. Needing to put distance between herself and him as his cock leaks between his legs and begs him to…

He forces himself from the room with significant effort, a protesting growl of internal conflict dying somewhere in his throat as he makes his body move through the doorway and into the cold, dark air of the hallway. 

It’s sobering, the sudden rush of cold around him and the sudden lack of the lurid scent of her arousal on the air, but not enough. Not enough to allow him to even consider re-entering the room. Not enough for the feral thrill up his spine to subside, and the force of it in his veins forces him farther into the castle. 

He takes to the halls of the keep and prowls them. Stalking desperately through the empty, dark spaces. Trying to focus his mind on anything, anything, other than the knowledge of what she sounds like in the throes of pleasure. Trying to take his mind from the knowledge of what she must taste like from settling heavy and warm on the back of his tongue. 

He spends the entire night like that. Pacing the halls of his castle like an apparition, warring inside at the conflict of who he is, and who he does not wish to be. 

When night falls at the end of the next day, Thor locks his bedroom door. Feeling sick to his stomach as he forces himself away from the sturdy wood of it and into his bed. He cannot sleep as he sits there, miserable, and watches the door. 

Late in the night the door budges and clicks. The handle being tried from the other side. There’s a pause, then another nudge of the door that does not budge, and then silence falls heavy in the room. 

Thor turns away from the door, tasting bile in his throat, and forces himself to lay down. Knowing sleep will not come for him but needing desperately anyway to try.

The next morning, she avoids his gaze over their morning meal. Sipping quietly at her tea and keeping her eyes trained steadily out the window to where a pair of small birds are flittering about in the early sunlight. 

He supposes that she must feel as though he has rejected her and he can’t bring himself to eat any of the food she’s laid out on the table between them. His nerves too frayed to be able to keep anything down as he steals glances at her across the room and tries to ignore the beat of her heart. Quicker than usual, sounding almost nervous to be in his presence. 

He determines that this is the way it must be, as he excuses himself from the kitchen and makes his way down to the foyer, prepared to roar his stress into the wind in a hard run through the forest.

It’s better for her to have her feelings hurt by the perceived rejection than it is for him to hurt her. If she fears him or hates him now, that is the burden he must bear for reacting to her in such a way. For having so little control of himself around someone so small and fragile. He would bear her hatred of him one thousand times if it meant avoiding waking up to him forcing himself between her legs where she could not want him. 

Thor takes to the woods. And he runs and he runs, and he howls and he howls. 

They don’t speak of Thor locking his door at night, just as they never spoke of him joining her in the first place. And though Thor wants nothing more than to relegate her to her bedroom in the nighttime hours, he finds himself worrying. As he is wont to do with her, it seems. 

It doesn’t occur to him until the third night that he’s kept her from his bed but it wakes him suddenly. Has him sitting upright in his bed, the pelts over him pooling around his middle, as he realizes that she can’t come to him now if her fire goes out. If she needs him. 

She could knock, he supposes, but he knows, knows as he knows her like he knows himself that she won’t. Knows from seeing her in the days since that she’s taken the locking of his door to be the rebuke that it was, intentional or otherwise. He knows that if her fire extinguishes in the night or if she otherwise needs him, she will choose instead to suffer silently in the confines of her own room, and the thought of it eats him alive. Gnaws at him as he looks from his flickering fire to the door of his room, then back to the fire. His shoulders tightening in stress as he tries to sort out some solution to this situation that doesn’t involve her freezing to death in her room but somehow also avoids him mounting her in his sleep. 

He doesn’t trust himself around her now. Not while he’s asleep, anyway. Not when she’s curled up so close to him, so warm and soft and inviting. Not when he’s not awake and aware and able to remind himself of the bitter, ugly truth that she could never want him in this form. 

His compromise is cowardly, but it works. He sees her to bed in her room each night as he did before, wishing her a restful sleep and closing the door behind him. He retreats to his own room then, securing the door behind him, though he has not heard her try to join him since the first night he locked it. And then he sleeps fitfully for a few hours until he wakes in the earliest hours of the morning, the moon still high in the sky, and he slips from his bed and goes to her. Slinks through his doorway and pads quietly down the hall to stand outside her door for a moment. 

He presses his ear to her door and listens. Waits until he can hear the crackling embers of the fire in her hearth still, until he can feel the warm air seeping from beneath the crack under the door. He stays there a while longer until he can make out the distant thump of her heart, slow in sleep but steady and sure. Then he lets out an exhale and shakes his head and forces himself to return to the cold expanse of his own bed. Able to give into the inevitable pull of sleep only when he’s assured himself that she is warm and safe and whole on the other side of her bedroom door.

She approaches him a few days later when he’s preparing to go out into the woods to hunt. Their food supply isn’t low, he never lets it get particularly low these days, but he’s making the excuse to leave the castle and the strange air that’s been shifting between them over the last week. 

She seems to know this as she approaches him. Clad heavily in her furs and layers with her arms crossed over her chest and a stubborn set to her jaw as she stares at him. 

It makes him stand up to his full height as he looks at her. His mind turning slowly, a little confused. She’s dressed for the outdoors and her expression is somewhat cross. 

“Thor,” she says in greeting, on a serious nod, and now he _really_ has no idea what she means to do. 

He nods back, a little haltingly. “I’m just..going to…”

“Go hunting,” she says, and he nods again. 

They have a moment of a stand-off, both silently regarding the other, and then right as Thor is about to excuse himself and make his way towards the door, she speaks again. 

“I’d like to come along.” 

That stops him. Makes him turn again to face her, his face crumpled in incredulity. She can’t be serious. 

But she’s standing there, bundled up tight in her furs, and she does not appear to be fooling around. Not moving from where she’s stood a few feet from him, her arms crossed stubbornly over her chest. It’s the closest they’ve been in days and he finds it makes his heart beat a little hard in his chest. 

“You’re not serious,” he voices, not bothering to mask the dry skepticism in his voice. Hoping a little that it wounds her, if only a little. Hoping it’ll push her into retreating from whatever she’s trying to do right now. 

But she’s made her mind up, it seems. On whatever this...is. 

She shrugs. Undeterred. 

He squares his shoulders to her and looks down at her, his lips tugging at his tusks. “You’ll slow me down. I won’t catch anything.” 

She makes a sound that rings a little unimpressed. “I doubt that very much. You’re an excellent hunter.”

He barely stops himself from crossing his own arms over his chest. Unmoored by this, their first real confrontation. Not sure why he’s even indulging her in this, when he could slip from the door before she could even blink. 

“I’ve seen you walk in snow,” he reminds her. “Like a toddler.” 

If his words land at all, she is too stubborn to show it. She stays rooted in her spot, her jaw set, and while he cannot fathom the reason for her sudden interest, he acquiesces after a long, staring moment. 

If he manages to catch anything it’ll be a miracle and maybe the sight of him ripping something’s head off with his teeth will be enough to draw her back into the uneasy distance they’d settled into the last few days. Instead of whatever...this is. 

“Fine,” he mutters, and the nod she gives him then is so serious that he has to turn away to hide the way it makes the corners of his mouth tug up at the absurdity of it. “I won’t slow down for you,” he says, and she makes an affirmative noise behind him as he steps out into the wind and the snow and hears her follow close behind. 

He slows down for her. All of his bravado fades when he makes it a few steps past the servant door and hears the sound of her stepping through the deep drifts of snow, out of breath after just a few feet of walking, and suddenly the thought of leaving her there on the snow flurrying thick in the air is repulsive to him. Not an option. 

So he travels slowly, for him anyway. Taking steps through the deep snow and dragging his legs through it a little. Making a channel for her to shuffle through behind him as she huffs and puffs, wrapped up tight in her furs. It takes them nearly five minutes to even reach the edge of the woods, and by the time they cross over into the relative quiet afforded by the cover of the trees, Thor has given up any hope whatsoever of catching wild game with her in tow. 

The snow is shallower under the trees, though, and she catches her breath for a moment, behind and slightly to the right of him. He pretends to busy himself with what he hopes look like hunting behaviors to her, turning his head slowly to pretend to scan the forest floor. Not wanting to push her or make her feel like she’s holding him back when she’s really doing nothing but. 

It makes him shake his head at himself. Hopeless for her, like he always, infuriatingly is. 

When she seems to have gathered her strength, her breathing back to normal, he moves forward. Having decided to just lead her through the motions of what a hunt could be, since she’s apparently so desperate for the experience of it. The branches cracking beneath her boots will send any game to ground or flight long before they’re in range, and although he was decidedly right about that, he knows that he won’t tell her, even when they come up empty handed at the end of this. 

They move through the trees in silent tandem, her breathing a little loud in the quiet air beneath the pines, though he thinks she’s trying to control it for his benefit. As predicted, there is no life to be seen on the forest floor, their presence announced so loudly by her footsteps and breathing that Thor might as well have screamed at any game to run for cover. 

Still, it’s not unpleasant to be outside and breathing in the cold air, and he finds some part of him aching at the feeling of her close to him once more. For the first time in days, as she struggles to keep pace with his gentle one. He reaches back to help her over obstacles as they appear, holding her hand as she hops over a little trickle of a creek running downhill through the trees, getting close and wrapping an arm around her waist to bring her to the ground from atop a large boulder. Releasing her and stepping away once she has her feet back underneath her, but unable to miss how her gloved hands grip tight at him before he does. 

An hour passes before Thor even realizes it, having gone a little distant in himself at the familiar pull and soothe of the woods around him, and he’s more than a little surprised when he looks back over his shoulder and finds her keeping pace with him. The hair showing under the edge of her hat darkened with sweat, her cheeks puffing with exertion, but her expression is one of steady determination, and it makes something pulse painfully behind Thor’s ribs. 

He’s...glad for her stubbornness, he realizes. As he slows his pace again, deliberately, to make keeping stride with him easier on her. Grateful for her dogged determination to power through the strange feeling between them that started when he rejected her from his bed, even if it was for her own sake. 

He...missed her, and he allows himself a moment to draw up and stop beneath a towering fir tree, to let her come stand beside him and catch her breath. 

She props her hands on her hips as she breathes, her chest rising and falling, and he tamps down the urge to gather her in his arms and carry her back to the castle. Reminding himself that she is not as fragile as he thinks. 

There’s a fallen tree a few steps to the right of them and after she casts a glance up at him and sees he doesn’t mean to spur them on further, she allows herself to go rest upon it. Sitting heavily, letting out a weary breath. 

“You were right,” she says after a long moment. “I’m slowing you down.” 

The problem isn’t so much her speed as it is the absolute cacophony of noise she makes as she moves through the trees, but he offers her a shrug. 

“Somedays the hunt just isn’t there,” he murmurs, letting his eyes fall to the bed of snow slush and pine needles beneath her booted feet. Something is warming in his veins, a feeling he grits his teeth against and ignores steadfastly. An urge to go to her and gather her up in his arms. To press his face against her throat where her pulse is quick and a light sheen of sweat has broken out. 

They sit in silence for a long while while she catches her breath. Around them, the woods remain silent and empty, line shining in occasional beams through places of light snow and bough cover. It’s peaceful and Thor allows his senses to drop as he simply stands with her and keeps his eyes anywhere but her, though he feels her eyes drift often to the side of his face. 

He wonders what she must think of him. Towering over here out here in the woods, the bare skin of his chest nearly steaming with heat in the cold air. His hair long and around his shoulders, his horns jutting up and behind him into the air. His hands massive where they hang limply at his sides. It’s as wild as she’s seen him, he thinks, and he wonders what feelings it inspires in her. If she fears him like she should. 

The sound of a twig breaking rouses him, makes his head turn to her, amazed she’s able to make sounds even as she’s _sitting on a fallen tree_ , but it becomes apparent in an instant that she was not the maker of the sound. 

He crouches down to his haunches on instinct, his brow drawing, and he hears her suck in a quiet breath beside him. Understanding, perhaps, that something is finally there in the woods with them. 

They sit in hushed silence and Thor wonders for a moment if he heard something that wasn’t there, but then there’s another soft crunch of vegetation underfoot, and Thor knows that something is coming towards them. 

It moves in slowly, entirely unconcerned with their presence, and the time it takes to appear in Thor’s line of vision gives him plenty of time to hazard a guess as to what it is. Because it sounds...peculiar, as it crosses over the slushy ground. It sounds larger than a hare but lower to the ground than a stag, and whatever Thor thinks it could possibly be, he is stunned when he finally ambles past the fallen log she’s sat on and into his sights. 

A wolverine. Moving low to the ground on all fours, massive paws swinging easily as it makes its way through the forest. It’s thick, dark pelt dusted with a fine layer of snow, rippling as the beast walks.

Thor knows this wolverine. They’ve crossed paths a few times out here in the woods and both have steered clear of the other. A wolverine is a nasty creature with canines several inches long and claws like daggers and the spirit to fight anything to the death that even looks at it sideways. Plus, they’re terrible eating, so Thor’s never bothered to even consider going after the thing. 

The wolverine seems to have made a similar calculation about him, knowing itself to be no match for Thor no matter how ferocious it’s spirit, and they’ve simply passed each other without incident the times they’ve seen each other out here in the dark. One apex predator nodding to another. 

Thor knows it must sense him but the creature is unconcerned as it walks across the forest floor, barely sparing him a glance as it begins to move past him. 

Beside him on the log, she’s covered her mouth with her hand. Her eyebrows are up near her hairline, but with something that looks like wonder instead of fear, and although she won’t get to see Thor make a kill today, Thor is glad to at least have been able to give her this. A glimpse at a creature nearly as elusive as Thor himself. And nearly as deadly to the other creatures of the forest. 

Thor stays crouched on his haunches between the wolverine and her, watching it carefully as it moves past them. It seems determined to carry on it’s way and pay Thor no heed at all, but then a trickle of wind blows from behind Thor, and he watches the creature freeze. 

It turns towards Thor, it’s nose working on the end of it’s blunted snout. Scenting heavily at the air. A rumble starts in Thor’s lungs. Low and instinctive, as the wolverine’s eyes begin to search around the area of Thor in apparent interest. 

He can see the moment the creature sees her, sitting there on the log. Can see the sudden lurch to the beast’s muscles, how they lock rigid at the sight of something other than Thor in it’s woods. The rumble in Thor’s chest grows, audible now, and he feels her eyes fall to the back of his head in confusion. Her heart beat kicking up but now in a touch of uncertainty. 

The wolverine stays frozen for a long moment. Sniffing at the air and letting it’s tongue come out to taste at it. Thor sees it’s eyes lock on her, over Thor’s shoulder, and then the wolverine lifts its lip in a snarl, showing rows of shining, sharp teeth. 

Thor moves before he can even think. Before a thought can even make its way into his mind that’s gone feral at the flip of a switch.

He lunges forward, his teeth bared in a roaring snarl, and the creature is too stunned to react until Thor’s hands smash into it. Gripping viciously at it’s throat and it’s side, and all hell breaks loose. 

The wolverine screams in a furious howl and then they begin to fight. 

Thor has every advantage, in truth, but the wolverine is made of hard corded muscle and sharp claws, and it takes considerable effort to get a grip on the thing as it lunges at Thor with snapping jaws, it’s claws raking over his bare skin and drawing blood. He snaps his teeth back at it, his hackles raised, blind with fury, until he manages to get a hand around the creature’s shoulders and gets it pinned to the ground. 

It thrashes beneath him, screaming it’s raspy roar, and manages to flail hard enough to sink its teeth into the thick meat of Thor’s wrist. Thor’s other hand comes up quick, getting his knee over the creature’s ribcage and crushing down with all of his weight until he feels bone start to break, and he struggles with the creature until he manages to get both hands around it’s throat. 

It’s a slow, miserable thing. The beast fights too hard for Thor to get a proper grip and break its neck in a merciful death, so Thor is forced to keep it pinned beneath him, and to slowly crush the life from it with his hands around its neck. The creature howls and screams and Thor feels no regret as he snaps his jaws at it once more, a roar building his chest and getting lodged in his throat as his blood pulses heavy in his ears. 

It’s several minutes before the thing finally stops fighting, going limp beneath Thor after giving one last furious, winded growl, and Thor keeps his hands on it for a while longer. Just to be sure. 

The sound of her standing is what brings him back to himself, and his head whips to look at her. Forcing himself to stumble a step back from the animal beneath him, his knees sinking into the slushy ground. 

His chest is heaving, a low growl still rumbling from deep in his chest, and he shakes his head hard to clear his vision that's closing in around the edges. So he can see her, to see if she’s alright, if she’s afraid - 

He can’t decipher the expression on her face as she stands there beside the fallen tree, her eyes wide. Mouth dropped open, her heart racing loudly behind her ribs. He half expects her to flee, to turn on her booted heel and take off into the woods, but instead she rushes to him. Dropping to her knees before him in the slow and touching at him with the soft fur of her gloves hands. 

“Thor,” she says, sounding a little panicked as her hands touch at the four claw swipes across his shoulder. 

His words are almost slurred when he speaks, his blood thickening with endorphins from the fight. All rushing to him at once now that he’s neutralized the threat and he sees that she’s alright. That she’s still there with him, her heart beating strongly and surely in the quiet of the woods. “Are you alright?” he asks, and she makes a sound like she might hit him. 

“I’m fine, Thor,” she says, and it’s not until she takes his hand and draws it up that he realizes the creature got a good bite in there. The flesh on his forearm is shredded, ripped open and oozing dark red blood onto the snow below, and she looks like she might faint as her eyes jerk between his hand and his face. 

“Just - ” he says, holding up his good hand to her. Needing a moment. 

She nods, her breath tight in her throat, but she gives him time. Kneeling with him in the hushed quiet of the woods, as he catches his breath. As he gets a grip on the human parts of him and forces them back to the forefront. Consciously tucking his lips down over his teeth that are still instinctually bared in a snarl, shaking his head to stop the rumble from sounding from deep in his chest. 

The cold on the snow on his knees reaches him finally, and when he looks back at her, he finds his vision clearer. She’s pale, either from the cold or the fright, and he can’t stop himself from reaching towards her with his good hand. Curling his hand around her jaw, tilting her head to the side. Letting his eyes rove over her until he’s satisfied that she’s untouched. That she’s alright. 

He pushes himself to his feet, coming back to himself more and more by the second and finding himself alright as well. No worse for the wear, really, save for the wound to his forearm that predicts will heal without much fuss. 

His gaze goes to the wolverine, laid out on the snow, and her gaze follows his. He can’t bring himself to regret a thing. He takes a step towards it and stoops down. Gripping it by the scruff and curling it around his neck to carry back to the castle. It’s pelt is too fine to waste. 

He looks down at her where she’s stood at his side, relieved to see some of the color returning to her cheeks as her heart rate begins to steady once more. 

“How’s that for a hunt?” he asks, and she shoots him an utterly stunned look. A weak, soft laugh falling from her lips as she shakes her head at him. 

“Can we go back now?” she asks, her voice still a little small as her eyes drift to the head of the wolverine where it’s resting against Thor’s shoulder. 

Thor nods. If he’s starting to feel the cold then she definitely is. And she seems to be handling herself alright, but he’ll feel better once he has her in dry clothes and under the familiar roof of the keep. 

“Let’s go,” he says, stepping away from the fallen tree, and she falls into place beside him. 

She doesn’t drop his good hand, both of her gloved hands clasped tightly around it, and lets his fingers close gently around hers as they make their way into the dark of the forest, on the pathway that leads to home. 

He wants to skin the wolverine when they cross through the gates of the keep, but she refuses. Adamant, her voice a little thick with emotion when she tells him _no_ , so he doesn’t press the matter. He leaves the creature alongside the stone of the castle wall to clean in the morning, and lets her pull him inside. 

She’s a flurry of motion once they make it inside the castle, dropping his hand, finally, only to pull her gloves from her hands with her teeth, disrobing quickly and letting the pieces of her outer clothing fall in a heap to the floor. Her clothes beneath are soaked in sweat and Thor has a moment to bite his tongue at himself, at how hard he pushed her earlier in the day through the snow, before she’s ripping the pelt from his shoulders and letting it fall to the floor. 

He wants to stop her, to tell her that there’s no need for her to drag him through the castle halls towards the kitchen, but she shoots him a look the second his mouth opens to do so that tells him such comments would not be well received. 

She brings him to the kitchen and sets to work. Tugging him until he’s stood beside the water basin and then flitting around the room. He stays where she left him, understanding that this is something she feels she needs to do, so he watches as she digs through drawers until she comes up with dressings and other linens, that she piles next to the basin. 

She is gentle, achingly so, when she takes Thor’s bloodied hand in hers, and her eyes go to his for a moment as she touches gently at where the flesh of his forearm is torn. 

“Thor,” she murmurs, shaking her head as blood continues to ooze freely, and something shades across her expression, Something rich and true, something heart-wrenchingly sincere, and he finds he has to avert his eyes from it. Looking instead to the water pump over the basin to stop his heart from flipping wildly in his chest. 

He’s fine, in truth. With a cleaning and some dressing, he’ll recover no worse for the wear. But some part of him knows that if he tells her this, she’ll begin to cry, when she’d very much like not to do so. So, he stays quiet while she examines his arm. Turning it this way and that in the fading light in the kitchen as the sun sets. 

She gets the handle of the water pump in hand and works it until water flows freely. She gives him a soothing mouth sound when she guides his hand beneath the flow, though he doesn’t flinch when the water flows over the torn flesh on his wrist. 

When she sees he can handle himself, she sets to work. Feeling at the wound carefully and pulling back any loose skin to wash beneath it. It becomes clear after a few moments that the wound will not stop bleeding on it’s own, so she instructs him to hold his arm up over the basin, and turns behind her to take stock of the supplies she was able to gather. 

Her hands are soft and gentle on him when she presses a thick pad of fabric to the worst of it, rubbing her thumbs soothingly over the unblemished skin above it in apology as she presses down to halt the blood flow. 

She takes his good hand and presses it to the fabric, so he holds it there, pressed tight, as she begins to unfold linen strips, and sets to wrap them around his arm. She is methodical in her work, as she was with her cleaning and renovating of the castle, and he focuses instead on watching the catch of her lower lip in her teeth as she works instead of the stinging pain of the wound on his arm. 

She has him patched before long, taking a damp, clean cloth to the rest of his arm to wipe away any stray droplets of blood, and she takes a step back then. Letting out a heavy exhale and asking him if it’ll do. 

He grips his hand into a fist and finds the action hurts, as expected, but the bandage holds strong. 

He nods to her. Feeling a rumble kick up in his chest again. “Thank you,” he says, and she lets out another heavy exhale. 

“Does it hurt?” she asks, her eyes dropping nervously to the bandage then back up to his face. 

He shrugs and tries to offer her a smile that comes off a little lopsided. “Not terribly,” he says, lying a little, and she nods in response. 

He goes when she pushes him backwards and he doesn’t realize her aim until she has him plopping down on a stool there in the kitchen. Facing the window and catching the last of the evening light as it casts through onto the floor. He gathers from the expression on her face that she’s not done, and he’s proven right when she wets another cloth and comes around him to dab gently at the claw marks over his shoulder and down his belly. 

He breathes out and then in, drawing in a deep pull of her scent into his lungs as he does, and he lets her fuss over him. 

Once the scratches over his torso are cleaned, she finally allows him to stand, and they fall into the easy routine of their nightly dinner ritual. She starts and stokes the fire in the hearth while Thor gathers several frozen hare from the ice chest and sets them on the table. 

They each take two and clean them in companionable silence, and Thor is struck as he scoops cold innards out onto the table, that he missed this. Missed this easy company between them, her humming a soft tune as she skins her hare with the skilled cut of a paring knife. 

As their dinner is placed over the fire to roast and she rinses the blood from her hands in the basin, Thor realizes that he is unwilling to return to the discomfort of the previous few days. He’s unwilling to go back to treating her like a stranger, to push her back and away from him. 

He doesn’t know what the answer is, as he watches her dry her hands on a towel and then throw him an easy smile when she catches him staring, but he knows he will have to find it. He will have to find a way for them to live together, like this. Because he realizes, as the smell of roasting game fills the kitchen, that he can live no other way. 

The rest of the night unfolds in a very usual way. They retire after dinner to the great hall to lounge over furniture by a roaring fire and as she reclines across the settee there, she cannot stop speaking. Words flow from her in a steady rhythm and Thor finds it an immense comfort. Responding when he is called to as his eyes grow heavy, grunting and nodding in encouragement when she simply goes off on her own tangent. 

It feels as though she has ground to make up, after their days spent apart, and the warmth of her company settles over Thor like a blanket. Her voice is sweet and soft, with a cadence that feels musical, and he doesn’t realize that he’s nodded off until she wakes him with a gentle hand on his shoulder and he finds her standing over him. Looking down at him with an expression on her face that he has to look away from, something seizing tightly in his chest at the sight of it. 

He walks her to her room and kneels slowly before her hearth. Stacking fresh firewood in the iron grate there and striking a light with two flint stones, while she prepares for bed behind him. By the time the fire is roaring and he stands, she is beneath the covers and watching him with a look that beckons him. 

He hesitates a moment, looking to the door where he would typically go, but something draws him to her, and in a moment of weakness, he goes. 

He comes to stand beside her bed, looking down at her as the fire casts her in warm, orange light. He doesn’t know what to do, his heart tripping foolishly in his chest, so her hands come up and curl around his good hand. Bringing it up to her cheek and pressing it there while her eyes close and she leans into the touch. 

His fingertips brush at the edges of her hair, where it’s plaited back for sleep, and his heart aches in his chest as he lets his thumb rub softly over the curve of her cheek. 

“Goodnight,” he murmurs, and she turns her nose against his palm. 

“Goodnight,” she sighs, releasing his hand after a long moment. 

She keeps him there with her gaze for a long moment before he forces himself back. Backing two steps and then turning and going to her doorway. He turns the lock on her side of the door, as he does every night, and then allows himself one last look at her before shutting the door closed behind him. 

The walk to his bedroom is silent and solemn, and Thor feels every step of it hollow and pounding in his chest. 

He awakes just after midnight. Blinking himself slowly awake before pushing the bedding off of him into a pile on the edge of the bed and slipping his feet from the bed down to the floor. He pads quietly to the edge of his room and slips through the doorway, his mind muddled and heavy with sleep but operating mostly on habit and instinct as he goes to check on her. To be sure her fire still burns warm and that she wants for nothing in the night.

His steps are quiet as he makes his way down the hall and he stops himself beside her door. Blinking sleep heavy eyes as he presses his ear near the door to listen for the sound of crackling embers. 

A scent touches at his nose. Just a light flirt of it on the air, and it has his eyes widening. Blinking open as the veil of sleep slips from him. He presses closer to the door, his heart kicking a little. Confused, even from the tiniest little change in the air, and when he presses his ear to the door, he hears the beat of her heart. 

It is fast. Healthy and strong but quick, like a rabbit’s, and something like fear douses over him like a bucket of ice water. He holds himself steady, his ears straining. Unsure if perhaps she is simply dreaming or if she is in real peril, and then that same trickle of sent touches at his nose, and he hears a ragged, soft intake of her breath. 

He reaches for the door handle, intent on rattling it, waking her, but then through the door he hears as her breath catches and thickens warm on a sweet, syrupy moan. 

Every part of Thor goes rigid. His breath held and burning in his lungs as he listens, and then hears the faint sound of wet, and then he realizes that the scent is one he knows. One he’s smelled before, before he banished her from his bed. 

Thor’s blood turns to fire in his veins as he realizes that he is smelling her arousal, and another moan filters through the door. Breathless and wanton, and Thor’s cock fills so fast between his legs that he nearly faints as he realizes what is happening. What she’s doing. When he realizes that she’s laid out on her bed with her hand between her legs. Touching at the wet, soft slick of her sex as she imagines...whatever it is that brings her pleasure. 

Thor can’t breathe. Can’t think over the roaring of his blood in his ears as his cock hardens thick and full. Can’t bring himself to move, to _leave_ , like he knows he should, as he hears the faint sounds of her hand moving against her sex and the whispered moans falling from her lips. 

Shame is a wildfire through him, ripping up his spine as he gasps in a ragged breath and feels his cock twitch and leak prespend to the stone floor below. Knowing he should leave, knowing he should _go_ , he should return back to his room and leave her to this quiet, private moment. 

His head swims, nearly lightheaded with the force of his arousal, and he is about to force himself back. To at least retreat to the dignity of his room before taking himself in hand to chase relief, when he hears her voice catch in her throat once more. A broken, soft moan that breaks around the sound of something he has to strain to hear. 

And then, like a rung bell, he hears it. 

Her voice is rich and heady, thick with desire, when she whispers, “ _Thor_ \- ” 

For one hushed moment, the earth stills. Everything goes silent and rigid as Thor’s blood rushes in his ears. As his mind whirls uselessly, trying to understand what he just heard - 

Then, his body moves on it’s own. He turns on his heel and races blindly to his room. Barely managing to make sure the door stays shut behind him as he surges to his bed. Blind with arousal, his heart soaring in his chest, crowding all the air out of his lungs as his cock aches and his blood roars. 

He makes it to the edge of his bed and he’s lost in it. His mind gone feral at the sound of his name falling from her lips. Gone mindless and utterly animal as he pushes up against the edge of his bed and grips both of his hands around his cock. Pressing his knuckles into the mattress and rutting into that tight grip hard on a ragged snarl. His cock is a leaking mess and prespend coats his palms in one tight stroke, and then he’s baring his teeth, his eyes squeezed shut, and fucking the tight, hard grip of his fists at the edge of his bed. 

His body takes over. Giving in to instinct he’d pushed down, pushed away, since he’d first smelled her. Since he’d first woken up to the warm press of her body against his. He fucks his fists with hard slaps of his hips, his mouth dropping open as his mind whirls. Picturing - imagining - dreaming of the sweet velvet clutch of her sex around his cock instead of the pressure of his own hands. His eyes nearly rolling back into his head as he imagines the heat of her there and the sweet scent of her where she spills and wets and messes all over his cock and pelvis. 

The sound of her moans plays in his head on a frenetic loop, stuttering and breathless, and he imagines the sounds she would make if he put his hands on her. If he closed his mouth around the bud of her breast. If he felt between her legs at the slick soft heat of her sex. If he nudged at her there with the fat, broad head of his cock. 

A sensation rushes to him then, ripping up his spine, of him burying himself in her. Deep. Rooted to her very core as his knot catches and swells within her, and the thought of it rips Thor’s release from him. Makes him grit his teeth to silence a roar as his hips stutter and still against the tight clench of his fists as his cock hardens and bursts, spilling lash after lash of hot spend across his mattress. He moans, his face collapsing in pained pleasure as he shifts himself closer. As he fucks his hips tighter into the tight ring of his hands until his knot slips past and catches tight. He moans again, his whole body trembling, his head dropping, as his knot fills tight and his hips jerk against the mattress. Spilling and spilling thick ropes of his release across his bedding as his knock pulses and aches in his fists. His entire body ripples as he imagines her there, below him. Her sweet sex pulsing around the aching fill of his knot. Filling her up with his cum. Moaning for him softly, reaching for him as she breathes through the impossible press and fill of him. 

It takes some time for him to return to himself. After. He knows not how long he stands there at the side of his bed, gripping his softening cock and catching his gasping breath. His entire body thrumming with the glow of his first knot he’s allowed himself in years as he blinks himself slowly back to his conscious self. 

He finally lays himself down onto his bed, barely managing to throw a pelt down over the mess before he collapses down onto the mattress. The strength of his release took everything from him and he finds himself fading quickly. Staring distantly into the glowing embers in his hearth as sleep comes for him and crowds around his senses. 

All he can think as he slips under is that she said his name. _She said his name._

Thor wakes just as the sun rises, an energy springing forth in his veins that propels him from his bed and has him scrapping the bedding into a pile on the floor before he’s even fully aware of what he’s doing. He stands in his room, nude and broad, and stares at the mess of sheets on the floor as the memories of the night prior come rushing to him. 

He scrubs his hand over his face, his tusks tugging at his palm, and he feels a distant ache in his forearm. He looks down at it and sees a tint of red at the center of the bandage, and resolves, all at once, to change the dressing himself before she wakes. Not able to stand the idea of being close with her as his entire being rattles with the knowledge of what happened the night before. 

He shoves his tattered breeches onto his hips and makes his way down to the kitchen. Her door is shut when he passes it, and in his brief linger at the door, he hears her heart beat within, steady and slow with sleep. Grateful, he slips past her door and makes his way through the winding hallways until he finds himself under the stone archway of the kitchen door. 

The room is brightly lit with the light from the rising sun and he wastes no time. Moving to the basin at the side of the room and tearing at the edge of the bandage with his teeth. Ripping it and then unspooling it into a bloodied pile on the counter. He removes the wad of fabric over the wound with care, grimacing when it bulls at his torn flesh, and he frowns when he turns his arm to look at it in the light. 

It will heal, but it’s an ugly wound. Nastier than he’d allowed himself to admit the day before when he’d been focused on keeping her calm. On assuring her that he wasn’t going to drop dead at any moment. 

The flesh is torn still and inflamed. Puffy and red and tender to the touch, the edges of the wound already fading dark in a purple bruise. 

He rifles through the drawer he saw her look through yesterday and is relieved to find more dressings stacked there. Clean and ready for use, and not for the first time, he finds himself amazed at her. At her foresight and her selflessness as she worked to bring the castle back to life. 

If he had sustained this wound before her time with him, he would have barely even thought to dress it. Certainly wouldn’t have cleaned it. It probably would have gone septic and killed him, in truth, for as minor as the wound was. 

But she had taken the time to boil linens and cut them into strips and to leave them in case they were needed, and his heart beats in his chest in gratitude for her as he gets the water pump over the basin going and thrusts his arm beneath the flow of water. 

He grits his teeth, flinching as the cold water splashes over the torn skin, but he holds himself there. Turning his arm this way and that until the water runs clear. He shuts off the pump and dries his arm with a clean towel as best he can. 

As he begins the slow and awkward work of wrapping the bandage around his own arm, his mind drifts inexorably to her. His mind works itself dizzy as he tries to remember the night before. Tries to discern whether what happened was a dream or reality. If perhaps he imagined the entire thing, though it was certainly impossible to ignore the stain on his bedding this morning. But perhaps he had awoken from a frenzied fantasy and brought himself off there, alone? 

He finishes tying the bandage off with his teeth and he looks up to a sound at the door. 

She’s there, her palm resting against the doorframe. She offers him a smile, bright and easy, and Thor feels his lungs constrict as the faintest tease of a scent touches at his nose. Lingingering around her like a floral perfume. The smell of her arousal, still clinging to her fingers and between her legs. Faint, on the morning air, but unmissable. 

Thor’s entire body flares with heat. From his toes to his hairline and his stomach twists brutally in his belly as he watches her. Sure she can see every single thought play over his face. Sure she can hear the hammer of his heart in his chest and sense the stir of his cock in his breeches. 

But she simply wishes him a good morning and steps into the light of the kitchen. Making her way around the table to the pantry where she draws out a jar of loose tea for her morning cup. 

He moves away from her, going to stand on the opposite side of the table. Feeling jittery in her presence now. Still rocked off his balance from the monumental shift in his reality and unsure of how to catch his footing. 

She bends low next to start a fire to boil her water and when she stands back up, her eyes drop to the bandage on his arm. 

“How is it?” she asks. 

“Fine,” Thor says. Having to consciously conjure the word to his mouth and expel it forth. 

When she turns to the basin to fill a pot with water, he shakes his head, hard. Needing to clear it, or she won’t be able to miss how bizarre he’s being. How strange and out of sorts he feels. Knowing that she touched herself to the thought of him the night prior - 

His cock stirs again and he grits his teeth, turning his gaze out the window. He listens to the sounds of her moving around the kitchen, her slippered feet whispering on the stone floor as she walks. She puts the pot of water over the fire and comes to rest her hands on the table between them. Sighing again and sounding content, and he cannot get the sounds she made from his mind. 

“I think I’ll start on the bedrooms in the east wing today,” she says, drumming her fingers gently on the wood. “Would you care to join me?” 

Thor forces his jaw to relax on an exhale and he blinks against the morning light. He can’t get a singular thought from his mind and needs a reason. Any reason for why, for the first time, he will decline the offer of her company. 

“I need to clean the wolverine,” he says, forcing himself to meet her eyes. “I’ll join you after.” 

She nods agreeably, oblivious to the internal struggle waging inside of him like the clash of war hammers. “Can we eat it?” 

He clings to this change in topic, grateful for it. “We can try,” he says. “Predators do not often taste good.” 

She nods again. “I can make a stew,” she muses, turning to retrieve the pot from the fire when it starts to bubble. “My mother always made a stew when we had unsavory meat to put away.” He watches as she pours the steaming water carefully into a mug and catches the instantaneous floral aroma swirling up from the tea. “What will you do with the pelt?” she asks. “It looked quite lovely.” 

Thor hadn’t considered it but knows at once what he will do with it. “What would you like done with it?” he asks. 

Her face quirks over the lip of her mug. “You slayed the beast, Thor,” she says. “Should be you that gets the trophy.” 

“I want to make something for you,” he says, shaking his head. Insisting. Turning his mind’s eye back to the outdoor outfit she’d cobbled together from wardrobes across the castle. Trying to recall what hadn’t fit right, what she could use a better version of. 

She sips her tea and watches him across the table, a little curiously. “First you save me from the wild creature and then you gift me with the spoils of your conquest.” She sips her tea again, looking contemplative. “What have I ever done to deserve you, Thor?” 

Thor’s body heats, flushes with _something_ , and he forces his gaze out the window again. Feeling the tips of his ears go red. 

She comes around the table then, her steaming mug of tea in hand. “I think I’ll get started,” she says. Moving towards the door. “Join me when you're finished?” 

Thor nods, turning to watch her, and she flashes him another smile. Bright and a little teasing this time, and then she disappears through the door. 

Thor waits, his heart pounding hard in his chest as he realizes what he’s about to do. He listens to the sound of her steps disappearing down the hall and gives more time still for her to gather her cleaning supplies and head down towards the east wing. His cock aches in his breeches, hard already at the prospect of what awaits him, and when he thinks he can wait no longer, he pushes himself towards the door of the kitchen and steps out. Moving at once with a purpose, in the direction of her chambers. Propelled by a strange, heady mixture of delirious arousal and shame, his entire body feeling ablaze with it. 

He finds her room empty and has one moment of hesitation at the door before he’s stepping inside. Shutting the door behind him and locking it shut, then moving to the bed in long-legged strides. 

He climbs atop the bed at once, palming his cock and shoving his breeches down around his knees. His entire body rippling with shape as he pulls her bedding back and drops it to the floor. He crawls over the bed and lets his nose drag along the sheet, huffing in breaths through parted lips as his cock leaks between his legs. Hot and heavy and aching. 

He searches, delirious with arousal, as his nose and mouth drag over the soft linen of the sheet, until he hits a spot three quarters of the way down the bed. He moans, too loud as his eyes pinch shut, as his mouth opens over a dry portion of the sheet that is rich with scent. Dripping with it, pressed into the fibers of it, and his mouth is flushing with saliva as he rubs his face against it and takes his cock in hand. 

Every sense of his is blazing, every nerve ending frayed and overexposed as he beats his cock in his fist. Opening his mouth over the sheet and trembling down his entire body on a ragged groan when the taste of her explodes over his tongue. 

His mind whirls, drowning in sensory overload as he shoves his face in harder and lets himself imagine tasting her between her legs. Lets himself dream of pressing his mouth to where she’s slick and heated for him, lets himself fantasize of the soft gasp she makes when his tongue drags up the seam of her there. 

He doesn’t last. Can’t, not as his entire body grips and grits against the swelling wave of his want, his mouth pressed open and wanting against the evidence of her pleasure from the night before. His release is a brutal thing, his teeth clenching painfully tight as his cock bursts in his fist. Spitting his spend onto the bedding below as his hips bunch and rut. His mind gone syrupy imagining filling her up like this. Having her beneath him and finding his release deep in the tight warmth of her sex. 

He comes back to himself quicker than last night, brought around mostly by the shame that has him unsteady on his feet as he draws up his breeches and strips the sheets from her bed. His entire body flushing with mortification with the knowledge of what he has done as he gathers them in a bundle beneath his arm and all but bolts from her room. 

He’ll wash her bedding and his first, making his way down the washroom in the basement of the castle, and then he’ll commit himself to actually cleaning the wolverine. He’ll find her then, when he’s done, and he’ll try, with every single ounce of his being, to get the wildfire in his veins under his control. To stop himself, before this gets any more out of hand than it has already spiralled to be. 

She asks Thor after dinner for a trip to the baths beneath the castle and he acquiesces at once. Grateful for the distraction it will provide her, having spent what little of the day with her he did nearly leaping out of his skin. Needing a little distance, as he leads her down the spiraling, dark staircases towards the hot springs buried beneath the castle. 

She’s asked to come down here a few times before and once they step into the humid air of the room, they set about their individual tasks. She goes from torch to torch on the wall and lights them, lighting the room in a soft, flickering haze of mist and mineral. 

Thor goes to the wheel at the far wall and leans his weight into it until it budges at last and hot water rushes in. He stays there, feeling his hair curl and thicken in the humidity, until all of the pools are sloshing over with hot water. He turns the wheel back, cutting off the stream of water, and when he looks to find her, he sees her in the far pool. The deepest one, holding the hottest water. She’s in the water already, her body obscured beneath the ripple of the surface, but he feels his blood flush hot all the same. Knowing that she’s bared beneath it. 

He goes to leave her, as he has every time in the past, but a soft utterance of his name stops him. 

She has her arms resting on the side of the pool when he turns to look and she’s giving him a plaintive look. 

“Will you join me?” she asks, and Thor’s heart smacks against his ribs like someone threw it at a wall. 

He scrubs his good hand over his mouth, forcing his eyes away when her body begins to float up behind her in the water and he sees the faint outline of her rear beneath the water. 

“Do you need something?” he asks, his voice sounding a little weak. The baths are well stocked, he’s made sure of it. Washing cloths and oils and soaps all lined up around the edge of it for her use, whenever she pleases. 

“I’d like your company,” she says plainly, and Thor’s eyes fall closed as he feels his cock stir. 

He casts her a look through the mist. Trying to tell him with his eyes the choice that she’s making. 

But she seems sure of herself, unwavering in her gaze on him, and he gives, after a long, lingering moment. Stepping to the edge of the pool and looking apprehensively down into it. He hasn’t used these in many, many years. 

She has the decency to busy herself looking at the vials of oil on the opposite edge of the pool as he steps out of his breeches and steps down into the water. The water is scalding but pleasantly so, warming him to the bone at once as he settles down into it. He keeps his bandaged hand above the water as he moves down the pool to the opposite end of her, where he finds a stone ledge that he sits upon, his bandaged arm resting on the edge above the water line. The water rises nearly to his shoulders and he resists the urge to sink down deeper into it. 

When she turns and sees him at the far end of the pool she laughs. But it’s a kind thing, warm and close-sounding. A little exasperated as she watches him through the mist rising from the water’s surface. 

“When did you last bathe, Thor?” she asks. Letting her body sink into the water until it touches her chin. 

Thor has to think on it and is grateful for something else to think on besides the painful pulse of his cock below the water. “Years,” he admits. “In truth, before you, I had forgotten they were down here.” 

She seems somewhat unsurprised by his answer and reaches behind her for a vial on the edge of the pool. Pulling out the stopper and letting a bit of oil down into the water, where it swirls and spreads. A floral scent fills the air and it reminds him of her in a way that makes him shift uncomfortably on the shelved seat. 

“You’re surrounded by luxury here but you never allowed yourself any of it,” she says. It’s more a statement than a question and it hangs in the humid air between them. 

He nods, unable to disagree. He let the castle fall to ruin around him as he subsisted plainly day by day. It is a source of shame for him, now. Looking back on it. “It was wasteful,” he says. 

Her face creases and he thinks perhaps he missed the point she was trying to make. “It was wasteful for _you_ , Thor. Not for any altruistic purpose.” She lets herself drift closer to him and his heart thuds hard in his chest. “Why did you allow yourself to live a life so wanting when you were surrounded by anything you could have wanted? Did you not find yourself worthy of it?” 

She doesn’t mean it as a jab but it lands as one all the same. His lips tug on his tusks as he frowns. 

“Not everything I could have wanted,” he says, knowing he sounds petulant but unable to stop himself. 

She huffs out a soft laugh that is not unkind. “You had a castle. You had grounds and rooms and halls and a kitchen made for preparing great feasts. You had hot spring baths and the finest clothes, and you allowed yourself to none of it. What more could you have wanted?” 

“You.” 

His answer is plain and floats in the mist between them. She seems to consider her words before speaking again. 

“I don’t doubt that it must have been lonely,” she concedes, drifting closer still. Stopping a few feet from him, letting her arms rest on the edge of the edge of the pool. “Is that why you lived like that?” 

He looks away from her, down into the pool of water. “I had no one to share it with.” 

She nods where her head is pillowed in her arms. “And now?” 

Thor shrugs inelegantly. Feeling strange and out of place with the depth of this conversation. “Now I have you.” As soon as the words leave his lips he wonders if he overstepped, but the smile that curves her mouth is instant. 

“You do,” she agrees. “Now that you do, will you allow yourself these things? These luxuries? Will you find yourself deserving?” 

He gives her a look then looks down at himself in the water. “I’m here,” he points out, and she huffs a soft laugh again. 

“At my request, yes,” she agrees with a gentle tip of her head. “But I suppose you are right. You are here. Taking your first bath in a decade.” 

Her tone is teasing but he flushes all the same. “If I needed a bath, you could have told me,” he mutters, no real heat in it, and she laughs proper then. Staring over at him from where her head is resting on her arms with warmth in her cheeks. 

“I’ll have you know I quite like the way you smell, Thor.” 

Thor’s chest aches and his cock throbs. She doesn’t know what she’s saying. What her words are doing to him. 

When he doesn’t respond, she carries on. Her voice soft in the humid air and contemplative, like she’s thought a lot about it. “My point, though perhaps poorly made, is that you are deserving of these things. And I wish you would indulge yourself in them.” 

“I have been,” he tries, and she nods in easy agreement. 

“You have,” she agrees. “At least, in some things.” 

He frowns. “Where have I not?” He can’t think of an area of his life that hasn’t changed due to her. He eats indoors now for god's sake. 

She lets out another sigh then, like that line of questioning is one she’s not quite ready to undertake. His eye catches on her hand as it reaches back to where the oils are set out on the edge of the pool, and she gets a wash cloth in hand and tosses it to him. A bar of soap follows, dropping heavily below the surface of the water before bobbing back up. 

He looks to her in question, and she motions to him. 

“You’re in a bath,” she says, her smile turning a little teasing. “Wash.” 

She turns back from where she came and grabs the same for herself, dipping the washcloth into the water and then scrubbing the bar of soap between it in her hands. He drops his eyes when she rises from the water a little to run the rag over her arms and focuses instead on taking the soap and washcloth in his good hand and lathering it. Struggling when it slips around on him and drops back into the water. 

She seems wrapped up in her own washing so he struggles in silence for several minutes. Pathetically, honestly, not wanting to wet his bandage or bleed into the water but struggling to get a good grip on the bar of soap with one hand and only barely managing to impart any soap onto the rag. 

He grumbles to himself and settles for wiping over his chest with a washcloth that is mostly just water, hoping that whatever smells he’s carried around on himself for the last ten years will loosen and wash away in the hot water. 

He realizes that the sounds of water around her have gone silent a few minutes later and when he looks, she’s watching him. A curious expression on her face. 

“Can I help?” she asks, and before he can tell her no, actually, he’s quite fine, she’s swimming over to him. Drifting over into his space until she’s right before him and then getting her feet underneath her on the bottom of the pool. Standing upright, the water reaching the tops of her breasts and Thor feels his face heat as he looks away and presses himself farther back against the edge of the pool. 

Her scent is rich, this close. Thickened up on the humidity in the air, and he barely stops himself from opening his mouth to taste it. 

“Come on,” she urges, getting a hand around the elbow of his good hand and tugging him to his feet in the pool, until the water sloshes just above his waist. “I should have realized you’re one handed,” she says, sounding a little apologetic, and he hears the sound of soap being lathered on cloth. 

Thor’s entire body aches as he stands there. His cock is hard and aching below the surface of the water and he can’t….he can’t have her know. 

She keeps a respectful distance though as she reaches up with the sudsed washcloth and drags it over his chest. Using both hands to scrub it across the barrel of his chest, going lighter when it passes over the barely scabbed scratches from the wolverine. 

He lifts his arms at her quiet prompting, when she dips the rag back into the water to dampen it and then scrubs up beneath his arm. Wetting the hair there with soap and then rinsing it clean with another scrub of the cloth. She repeats on his other side, then has him turn so she can wash the broad contours of his back. 

Through it all, she is silent, and his mind races. Wondering what she’s thinking. What she’s _doing_ , as he helplessly memorizes the feel of her hands on his body, even with the washcloth between them. 

He doesn’t know how to piece together all of the elements of the last few days. Doesn’t know how they all fit. He doesn’t know if she truly desires him, or if he happened to catch her in a moment of vulnerability. Of weakness, giving in to the passions of the day, perhaps her fear for his safety or her gratitude for his protection of her. He doesn’t know she was even aware of what she did - could she have been dreaming after all? 

She is here, now. That is for certain, as she turns Thor back to face her in the water. She’s close to him, deliberately, and smelling so sweet to his nose. His mind whirls as he tries to make sense of it. To know what to do, unsure if she is making overtures or just being her typical caring self. 

Her voice interrupts his frenetic line of thought.

“Thor,” she asks, her voice quiet in the space between them. “Do your...senses, do they work down here?” 

He huffs out a soft sound. “I can see, if that’s what you mean.” 

But she’s not dissuaded. “What can you hear?” 

He thinks on it, over the roaring of his blood in his ears. He hears her. He hears her heartbeat. He doesn’t know if he’s ever told her that before. 

“I can...hear your heart,” he admits. “I can hear it beating.”

She seems unsurprised by the revelation, nodding. Leading the conversation with some intention he can’t quite understand. “How is it beating?” 

He listens. Feels his own heart thud in sympathetic response. “Fast,” he says. His voice pitching a little low. 

The scent from before has begun to tease at his senses. The crushed petal smell. He’d thought it was the oil at first but he wonders now if it was her all along. 

“Can you smell me?” she asks. 

He swallows thickly. Feeling like they are drawing towards something. The edge of some cliff. “Yes,” he admits. 

She drifts a touch closer, looking up at him through her lashes. Water moves over the tops of the curves of her breasts, and Thor’s ribs _ache_. 

“What do you smell?” she asks. Her voice gone a little breathless in the small space between them. 

He opens his mouth, then closes it. Unable to bring himself to say it. His entire body drawn tighter than a bowstring at whatever they are lurching steadily towards. 

She comes to stand before him and when she reaches up for his face, he doesn’t flinch back. Forcing himself steady as she rises onto her toes to touch her palms to the sides of his face. 

“Can you smell my desire for you, Thor?” she asks, and his face crumples. His eyes pinching shut on a soft groan, leaning his face into the cradle of her hands. 

“Can you?” she prompts gently, and he nods his face between her palms. “Do you believe me?” she asks, and he doesn’t know what she means, can’t make sense of it over the roar of his heartbeat in his ears, but then she’s taking his good hand in one of hers and placing it between them. Drawing it down and towards her, and when she brushes the thick of his fingers between her thighs, he moans at the feeling of slick gathered heavy there. 

“Thor,” she murmurs, and when his gaze lifts to meet hers she surges up to meet him. Tugging him down to her and pressing her mouth to his. 

Thor goes rigid, his mind shorting out in a white hot burst, and then something inside his chest breaks free, and he groans against her. Forgetting about the bandage on his arm and wrapping his arms around her. Gathering her close as he tries desperately to kiss her gently. Feelin the bulk of his tusks pressing against her mouth and wanting to howl for it. 

His hand between her legs bumps against her, nudges up, and she lets out a soft gasp against his mouth, a hot little puff of breath, and he decides this is better. He holds her close, nudging his nose against her hairline, as he lets his fingers delve into the silken folds of her sex. Slick, even in the swirl of water, and when he finds the little nub at the crest she wraps her arms around his neck and moans for him. The sweetest sound, catching in her throat before breaking free. 

He begins to touch her there, beginning to go out of his mind with delirium, with want, as he finds her soaking and sensitive and wanting of _him_. Of _his_ touch. When he swirls his thumb there, over that sensitive little bud, she lurches against his body on a breathless sound, and her voice echoes in his ear over the sloshing of the water as she repeats, “I want you, I want you, I want you,” like a benediction. 

He brings her to the edge of the pool and props her up onto it, needing his hands to be free to tug her close as he rubs his thumb against her in a building rhythm as she gasps and breathes for him. He presses his face against her throat and tastes at her skin there, heated and desperate, finally able to press his teeth against the fluttering pulse point in her neck and moaning softly at the taste of it. 

He is flying. Floating. Exultant, as he touches her and makes her head tip back on a warm moan that he feels down in the fat ache of his cock. Her breasts are pressed against his chest, her nipples hard and catching against the bare skin there and his knot aches with the need to be buried in her. To plunge himself deep where she’s gone soft and slick and needy for him. Where she could take him.

“Thor,” she whispers, and that’s all the warning he gets before she’s going stiff against him on a choked sound, before her body bows hard against him and she shudders out her release on a quiet wail. 

He draws back to see her face, stunned at the feeling of her sex throbbing against his hand. Pulsing against it in a rabbit-quick beat as she moans softly through the feeling of it. Her cheeks are flushed as she catches her breath in the flickering light of the caves, and her sex has not stopped throbbing when she reaches down into the water and wraps her hand around his cock. 

He lurches against her on a pained sound, nearly bashing her with his horns when his head drops on a ragged exhale. She grips him tight, her eyes shading dark as she can barely touch her fingers around it. She draws her hand down, a firm pump, and his hips bunch against her hand on instinct. His blood flashing hot and thick in his veins. 

His fingers are still touching at her sex, where the last of her pleasure is wringing itself out, and he leans back town to press a hot kiss to her jaw when he presses two of his fingers together and pushes them into the tight channel of her sex. 

Her entire body ripples on a moan as her head drops back to the stone floor, and when she looks at him again, the expression on her face is desperate. Wanting. Needing, him. 

They end up on the edge of the pool, Thor’s body perched over hers. She has both hands on his cock, gripping it tight and working it between her palms. Smearing the copious prespend down it’s length as his hips thrust to meet her grasp. Focusing on it as best she can with his thick fingers fucking into her. Curling against parts of her that make her gasp and cry against him, her hips bucking to meet the press of his hand as he nips at the soft skin of her breast. 

Their bodies move in tandem with each other, each needing the other closer. Needing more, as they drive the other closer and closer to a rush of pleasure. 

The scent of her is overwhelming like this. Thick on the air and clouding around them, bursting rich with floral and musk, driving him out of his mind. He’s nearly drooling where he has his mouth pressed against her breasts, imagining, dreaming of tasting her between her legs until she’s writhing for him. He thinks he’ll never have enough of it, this smell. He thinks he would roll his face in it every single day, and his body shudders when he allows himself a delirious moment to wonder if she’ll _let_ him. 

Her hands go weak around his cock and his eyes dart up to see her fade before his eyes. Her head tipping back against the stone as her sex clamps down tight around his fingers on a hard grip and then fires into rapid pulses. Her chest lurching with halting, soft moans as he wrings yet another release from her, feeling a rush of moisture push around his fingers in her sex. Coating him and making him groan as he works her through it. Sucking in heavy lungfuls of the taste of it on the air, feeling his cock pulse and throb as his own release draws near. 

He takes his cock in hand and begins to fuck into the tight pull of his palm. Letting his eyes fall closed as he rubs his face against her throat and tongues at her skin, feeling her sex pulsing around the fill of his fingers. Allowing himself the fantasy of dreaming of her aching and fluttering hard around his cock. Brought to pleasure by the hard press of him, filling her up tight. Smelling of him, all over, her skin marked in purpling bruises from the nip of his teeth. 

He stills over her when he cums. His muscles locking up as he shoves his hand around the base of his cock and squeezes the swelling bulb of his knot, letting a growl loose against the goosefleshed skin of her chest as she clings to him from below. Moaning softly at the feeling of his hot spend spitting out onto her belly and up onto her breasts. His knot aches in his fist and he can’t stop the soft nudges of his hips, his entire body aching with the thought of burying it deep into her sex. Wondering, delirious and out of his mind, if she’ll let him. If she’ll accept him like this. In this monstrous form of his. 

They both slowly drift back to themselves, their breathing slowly beginning to steady in heavy mist of the caves. Thor has half a moment to wonder if he’s hurt her, she’s so boneless now laid out on the stone floor of the baths, but when he touches his hand to her cheek, her face curves on an easy, blissful smile and she presses her face into his palm. 

He ends up pulling her back into the water. An arm around her waist to keep her limp body close as he sinks into the heated pool to rinse the both of them. Her head resting in the crook of his neck, humming softly as he lifts cupped handfuls of water over her to rinse his spend from her skin. To wash away the sweat that’s broken out over the both of them. 

Feeling her like this awakens some part of him that had long been dormant. Sparks some need to care for her, feeling her body warm and soft and loose against his. Holding herself to him with tired hands, her sweet breath fanning over the broad span of his throat. Letting him lift her from the baths and dry her. Dress her, then carry her up the stairs. Both knowing she could walk but that she doesn’t care to, preferring instead to let him do this. To press his nose to her hair and gather her close, as if his body could consume hers whole. 

There are things they should do, of course. Thor’s arm needs re-bandaging, the linens water-logged and dripping to the stone floor below. He should go back down to the baths and extinguish the torches and drain the pools. He should check the doors of the castle as he does every night to be sure they are locked tight and sure. 

But for now, he allows himself this. For now, he brings her to the great room and sits himself in his chair beside a roaring fire, his chest shuddering at the feeling of her curling against his chest in his lap. Pleased and warm and content as she murmurs to him in a constant stream of melodic consciousness, some that he catches and some that he does not. Leaning instead into the comfort of the feeling of her resting against him, allowing himself to nudge his nose against her hairline and breathe deep. 

There is much to do, yes, and much to work out. Conversations to be had, for sure, but those can wait. For now, Thor sits and holds her, as the fire crackles on and his heart fills so surely he feels as though it could burst. 


End file.
